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Punch Ice-Cream
Make about one-half teacupful of strong green tea, strain it when cold, mix with it one pint of rich cream, and add two wineglassfuls of rum and the strained juice of half a lemon. Sweeten the cream to taste, pour it into a freezing-pot, work it until well frozen, then pack it in a mould, and bury it in pounded ice and salt for an hour. When ready to serve the mould must be dipped into hot water, wiped quickly, and then turned out onto a hot dish.
An eggless, uncooked ice cream in the Philadelphia style, flavoured like a rum punch. The alcohol is the whole problem and the whole point.
- The hinge: alcohol and freezingTwo wineglassfuls is roughly 4 fl oz of rum against a pint of cream, which is a great deal of antifreeze. Expect a soft, slushy set at best; in a domestic machine it may never firm up. Cutting the rum to 2 tablespoons, or making up the volume with more tea, gives something that will actually hold a moulded shape.
- Old measuresA wineglass is about 2 fl oz. A teacup is variously reckoned at 4 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful of tea is somewhere between 2 and 3 fl oz. "Rich cream" here is best read as heavy cream, around 36 per cent fat.
- The green teaBrew it strong but not long — green tea steeped past three or four minutes at full boil turns bitter, and freezing will not hide that bitterness. Water at about 175F for three minutes, then cool completely before it meets the cream.
- Freezing-pot and iceThe original assumes a hand-cranked pail packed with pounded ice and rock salt, about three parts ice to one part salt by volume. Any modern churn does the same work; "work it until well frozen" simply means churn until it stops taking in air and thickens.
- Add the acid lastLemon juice can curdle cream, the more so once rum is in it. Combine tea, cream and sugar first, chill thoroughly, then stir in rum and lemon just before the mixture goes into the machine.
- Ripening in the mouldAn hour buried in ice and salt is the period equivalent of hardening in the freezer. A metal mould or loaf tin, well covered, two to three hours at 0F, will do it — longer if the full quantity of rum is used.
- "Turned out onto a hot dish"Read this as a slip or a very old convention; a hot serving dish will slump the ice cream immediately. Dip the mould briefly in warm water, wipe it, and unmould onto a chilled plate.
- Sweetening and yield"To taste" is unhelpful for a frozen mixture, which tastes markedly less sweet cold than warm — start around 1/2 cup sugar per pint of cream and taste the liquid base before churning. The quantity serves four to six as a small course.
Punch ices belong to the long European tradition of the sorbet au punch or Roman punch, a spirituous ice served midway through a formal dinner to clear the palate before the roast — a course that survived on grand American menus well into the era of the first Waldorf. What separates this version from the usual water ice is the cream base, which makes it closer to a frozen punch than a true sorbet. Green tea as a flavouring is worth noticing: tea-flavoured ices appear in the period literature, and here the tea supplies a tannic backbone. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, gathered the standing repertoire of a hotel kitchen that was expected to produce moulded ices on demand, which is why the instructions assume a freezing-pot, pounded ice and rock salt as a matter of course.