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Souffle Ice-Cream with Maraschino
Mix one teacupful of maraschino with two whites of Italian meringues when they are quite cold. Add one pint of well-whipped cream, and the kernels of eighteen walnuts (the walnuts should be picked before they are quite ripe, and the skins removed from the kernels). See that they are thoroughly incorporated with the other ingredients, and then pour the preparation into a mould, which should be mixed with salt and saltpeter and packed in well-pounded ice. When frozen, turn out, and serve.
This is a still-frozen souffl\
- Fix the hinge firstThere is no churning here. This is a soufflé glacé: an aerated mixture frozen still, so all the volume has to be built in before it goes into the mould. Fold the the meringue and the cream together only until no streaks remain — overworking collapses the foam and you get a dense, icy block.
- Italian meringueWhites whipped to soft peak, then a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 240F, poured in a thin stream while beating until the bowl is cool. For two whites, a workable quantity is roughly 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tablespoons water. The hot syrup is what makes this meringue stable enough to hold air through freezing, and the recipe is right to insist it be quite cold before the liqueur goes in.
- A teacupfulConventionally reckoned at 4 to 6 fluid ounces, though the book does not define it. Either way that is a great deal of spirit for one pint of cream, and alcohol will not freeze at freezer temperatures; expect a soft, spoonable texture at best. Halving the quantity gives a firmer set and still tastes strongly of maraschino.
- Maraschino means the liqueurA clear, dry cherry-kernel liqueur — Luxardo and Maraska are the surviving names — not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The modern jarred syrup is sugar and dye and will not stand in for it.
- Walnuts picked before ripeWet or slightly underripe walnuts, picked before the shell has fully hardened, have a milky, faintly bitter kernel and skins that peel away easily; the recipe asks for both the early picking and the peeling. They are a farmers' market item at best. Ordinary walnut halves work if you blanch them a minute in boiling water and rub the skins away.
- Salt and saltpeter in the iceThese belong to the packing ice, not to the ice cream itself; saltpetre appears in old freezing mixtures alongside rock salt, and is unnecessary now. A metal mould, cling film pressed to the surface, and several hours in a home freezer will do the work, though this much alcohol slows the set.
- Turning outDip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate. With this much alcohol it will soften fast, so serve straight away.
- YieldSomething over a quart once the cream and meringue are whipped; eight or so small servings, which is the right size for something this rich and this alcoholic.
Soufflé glacé belongs to the era before mechanical refrigeration, when a hotel kitchen froze desserts by packing a sealed mould in pounded ice cut in winter and stored in an icehouse, laced with rock salt — and sometimes saltpetre — to drive the temperature below freezing. Because the mixture sat still rather than being churned, it had to be built like a cold mousse from meringue and whipped cream, which is exactly what Oscar Tschirky's method does. The flavouring is maraschino, distilled from the marasca cherry and its kernels and generally traced to Zara on the Dalmatian coast, where the Luxardo family made it commercially from the early nineteenth century; by the 1890s it was one of the standard luxury flavourings of the American hotel dessert list, alongside kirsch and curacao. The instruction to pick walnuts before they are ripe points to a kitchen with access to a garden or a market gardener rather than a grocer, and to a taste for the slight bitterness of the green kernel against sweet cream.