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Plombiere Ice-Cream
Put into a stewpan one and one-half pints of milk or cream, fourteen ounces of caster-sugar, six ounces of ground sweet almonds and fifteen bitter ones (previously well pounded with one tablespoonful of orange-flower water), three ounces of apricot jam diluted with one teacupful of water, and the yolks of eight eggs, and place the pan over the fire, stirring constantly; when the mixture begins to get thick take it off and pass it through a fine sieve into a basin. Pour the preparation into a freezer, twisting the pan vigorously, and sometimes working with a knife or spatula. When the mixture is nearly stiff, add the white of two Italian meringues and work well again, add last of all one-half pint of well-whipped cream. It can either be turned out onto moulds, or served on a dish with a folded napkin. Heap it up in layers with apricot jam between, surrounded at the base with some almond cakes.
An 1890s French-style frozen custard from the Waldorf's kitchen, written for a hand-cranked pot freezer. It cannot be made as printed: the fifteen bitter almonds are the problem.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are pounded and moistened. They are not sold for eating in the United States and their sale is restricted or limited in a number of other countries, and fifteen of them is not a trivial quantity. The base here is cooked only briefly, until it begins to thicken, which cannot be relied on to drive off the cyanide. Use a current ice-cream recipe instead.
- The custard is barely cookedEight yolks are taken off the heat as soon as the mixture "begins to get thick," with no temperature given, so there is no assurance the eggs reach a safe temperature; the base is then chilled and frozen rather than held hot. Modern practice is to cook egg custard to a measured temperature.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, ground finer than granulated but not powdered; it carries no cornstarch. Fourteen ounces is by weight, roughly two cups.
- Orange-flower waterA distillate of bitter-orange blossom, still sold in Middle Eastern and baking shops. It is potent and was used here as a perfume for the almond paste, not as a liquid measure.
- "Italian meringues"Whites beaten with boiling sugar syrup poured in as they whip, which sets the foam and makes it stable enough to fold into a half-frozen base. The phrase "the white of two Italian meringues" is ambiguous; it most likely means meringue made from two whites.
- The freezerA pot freezer — an inner canister packed in ice and rock salt, twisted by hand while the sides are scraped down with a spatula. The scraping is what breaks up ice crystals; a modern churn does the same work mechanically.
- ScaleA pint and a half of dairy, eight yolks, meringue and a further half pint of whipped cream makes a great deal of ice cream — a banquet quantity, twelve or more servings, not a household batch.
Plombières is a French moulded ice cream, traditionally almond-scented and layered or studded with preserved fruit; the name is generally traced to Plombières-les-Bains, the spa town in the Vosges, though the connection is a matter of repetition rather than record. By the nineteenth century the term covered a family of rich, almond-milk-based frozen creams built up in a mould with apricot jam or candied fruit between the layers, exactly as here. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, compiled his 1896 book from the repertoire of a hotel kitchen working in the French grand-restaurant idiom, where bitter almonds were a standard flavouring alongside sweet ones — a few of them sharpened the almond taste of everything from ratafias to blancmange. That use has since been regulated out of the domestic kitchen, and almond extract now does the same job.