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Ratafia Ice-Cream
Put eight ounces of crushed ratafias into a saucepan, pour over two breakfast cupfuls of ratafia cream, add the yolks of half a dozen eggs and a little sugar, and stir well over the fire until the mixture is quite smooth and has the appearance of custard. Pass it through a fine wire-sieve into a freezer, work well, turn it into a mould packed in ice, and let it stay there until required. The ratafias should be crushed as fine as possible.
A cooked custard base flavoured twice over with almond — once by the crushed biscuits, once by the flavoured cream — then churned. The original assumes a hand-crank freezer and a household that keeps ratafia biscuits on hand.
- What ratafias areSmall, hard, dry almond macaroons about the size of a coin, sold in Britain as ratafia biscuits and close to Italian amaretti secchi. Eight ounces is a generous amount; crush them to a powder in a food processor, as the recipe insists, or the finished cream will be gritty.
- Ratafia creamNot a commercial product. It means cream flavoured with ratafia, the almond-and-kernel liqueur; figure on about a tablespoon of liqueur or a few drops of almond extract per cup of heavy cream, warmed to infuse.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup runs larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two of them is about 2 to 2½ cups of cream.
- The sugar is unspecified"A little sugar" is genuinely open. The biscuits are already sweet, so start at ⅓ cup for this volume and taste the custard before freezing; frozen mixtures read less sweet than warm ones.
- Cook the custard, do not boil itSix yolks in this much liquid thicken quickly. Stir over low heat or a water bath to 175-180F, until it coats the spoon; above about 185F the yolks curdle and the sieve will not save the texture.
- The sieve is not optionalPassing the mixture through a fine sieve removes biscuit grit and any set egg. Chill the strained custard thoroughly before churning, a step the original does not mention.
- "Freezer" and "work well"A hand-crank churn packed with ice and salt; working well means churning until thick. A domestic ice-cream maker does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes.
- Moulding and ripeningTurning it into a mould packed in ice, as here, is the period method for firming and holding a churned cream; period practice commonly mixed salt into the packing ice. A covered container in the freezer for two to three hours does it; let it soften a few minutes before serving.
- YieldAbout a quart, or six to eight servings.
Ratafia was a sweet cordial flavoured with fruit stones and almond kernels, and its name is generally traced to the Latin rata fiat — let the deal be ratified — from the custom of drinking a toast on signing an agreement. By the nineteenth century the word had drifted onto the crisp little almond macaroons sold to be crumbled into trifles, charlottes and iced creams, so a "ratafia" on a dessert list might mean the drink, the biscuit or the flavour. Almond-flavoured creams were a staple of the period repertoire, and the instruction to pack the mould in ice "until required" is a reminder that a large kitchen worked hours ahead of the dining room.