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Souffle Ice-Cream with Meringue
With the yolks of six eggs, one and one-half teacupfuls of pineapple syrup and a stick of vanilla, make a custard. Mix this with two whites of Italian meringue and one-half teacupful of noyau or maraschino, and then stir in thoroughly one pint of well-whipped cream, and finally two ounces of chocolate pastilles, and one-fourth of a pound of pineapple cut up very small. When well mixed together pour into a mould and place on the ice to freeze. When firm, turn it out, and serve.
This is a frozen soufflé or parfait: a still-frozen dessert that needs no churn because the Italian meringue and whipped cream carry the air. Everything depends on folding, not stirring.
- TeacupfulTeacup measures were not standardised, and the book never defines one; period sources put it anywhere from a gill to about 6 fl oz. Reckoning it at about 3/4 cup (6 fl oz) gives roughly 1 1/8 cups pineapple syrup and 6 tablespoons liqueur.
- Make a custardOscar assumes you know the method: whisk the yolks with the pineapple syrup and the split vanilla bean, cook over barely simmering water to 175–180F until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill completely. A warm custard will deflate the meringue and the cream.
- Two whites of Italian meringueThat means a meringue built from two egg whites and hot sugar syrup taken to the firm-ball stage, about 245F, beaten in until the bowl is cool. The hot syrup is what cooks the whites, and it is also what keeps the dessert from freezing hard.
- NoyauCrème de noyaux, a stone-kernel liqueur with a marzipan flavour, now scarce; maraschino is the easier of the two options and closer to what most kitchens have. Do not attempt a homemade kernel infusion as a substitute.
- Chocolate pastillesFlat chocolate discs, much like today's couverture fèves. Two ounces of chopped bittersweet chocolate or good chocolate chips does the same job; keep the pieces small or they freeze into hard shot.
- The pineappleUse canned or cooked pineapple, as the original's syrup implies. Raw pineapple's bromelain attacks the egg and dairy proteins and will leave the mixture slack and faintly bitter. Drain the fruit well — excess juice freezes into ice crystals.
- On the ice to freezeThis meant a mould packed in salted ice in the days before mechanical freezing. A domestic freezer at 0F does it: line the mould with plastic wrap, cover the surface, and give it at least 6 hours or overnight. Unmould by dipping the outside briefly in warm water.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten. It softens fast because of the liqueur and sugar, so serve straight from the freezer.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation from 1893 onward, published this collection in 1896, and its frozen sweets belong squarely to the French repertoire the hotel kitchens worked from. A soufflé glacé or parfait is not a soufflé at all — the name refers only to the puffed, aerated set of the thing, achieved with meringue and whipped cream rather than heat, and moulded in a paper-collared case so it appeared to have risen. The technique mattered because a still-frozen mixture could be made in advance and held in the ice cave, unlike a churned ice that had to be worked at the last minute. The pairing of pineapple with maraschino or noyau was a late-nineteenth-century commonplace, and the fruit's syrup did double duty as sweetener and flavour.