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Souffle Ice-Cream with Brandy
Mix one-fourth pint of brandy with two whites of Italian meringues and add one pint of the very best cream and three ounces of ginger comfits. Stir these well together, put them into a mould embedded in finely-pounded ice mixed with salt and saltpeter, and let it freeze. When quite firm, turn it out of the mould, and serve.
A still-frozen dessert in the French soufflé glacé manner: no churning, no custard, just meringue, cream and spirit set solid in a mould. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to make Italian meringue and pack a freezing pail, so most of the work is in what the text leaves out.
- The hinge: it will never freeze hardA half-cup of brandy in roughly a quart of base depresses the freezing point substantially, which is exactly why the mixture stays soft and mousse-like rather than icy. Give it a full 6 hours to overnight in the coldest part of the freezer, and expect a texture closer to semifreddo than to scooped ice cream.
- "Two whites of Italian meringues"This means meringue made from two egg whites, not two spoonfuls of finished meringue. Italian meringue is whites whipped while a sugar syrup cooked to about 240F is poured in; the hot syrup both stabilises the foam and brings the whites up in temperature, which matters here because nothing is cooked afterwards.
- MeasuresA quarter pint of brandy is 4 fl oz, about half a cup. A pint of cream is 2 cups; "the very best cream" means the highest-fat cream available. The original says only to stir everything together, but whipping the cream to soft peaks before folding it in will give a better set.
- Ginger comfitsComfits are sugar-panned sweets — here, ginger fragments in a hard sugar shell. Three ounces of chopped crystallised or candied ginger is the nearest modern stand-in; drain and blot any syrup so it does not thin the base.
- Salt and saltpeter in the iceThe saltpetre is packed around the mould, never in the food. Both salts depress the melting point of the ice to pull the temperature well below freezing. A modern freezer does the same job; if you want the period method, coarse rock salt alone in a ratio of about 1 part salt to 6 of crushed ice is sufficient.
- The mouldAny metal mould, loaf tin or bombe form works, lined with plastic wrap for an easy release. To turn it out, dip the outside in warm water for a few seconds — the alcohol makes the surface soften fast, so do not dawdle.
- Folding orderFold the brandy into the meringue first, then the whipped cream, then the ginger. Adding spirit to whipped cream directly will slacken it.
- YieldUpwards of a quart once the cream and meringue are aerated, serving 6 to 8. It is rich and strongly alcoholic; small portions suit it.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf, was compiling for a hotel kitchen where French frozen desserts were standard repertoire. A soufflé glacé is not a soufflé at all — it takes the name from its appearance, a light aerated mass risen above the rim of its mould, achieved with meringue and whipped cream rather than heat. Before mechanical refrigeration reached the American hotel kitchen, everything frozen depended on harvested ice and a salt brine, and saltpetre appears in period freezing mixtures alongside common salt as a further depressant of the melting point. Ginger comfits belong to an older confectionery tradition still: sugar-panned spices and seeds, generally traced back through medieval banqueting sweetmeats, which survived into the nineteenth century.