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Souffle Ice-Cream with Vanilla
Take two whites of Italian meringue, and when they are cold mix them with one ounce of vanilla sugar, and a pint of thoroughly whipped cream. Place a mould on the ice and pour in the mixture; then cover the mould and place it in pounded ice mixed with salt. When hard, turn out, and serve.
A still-frozen semifreddo rather than a churned ice-cream: there is no custard, no churning and no eggs cooked in the mixture, only meringue and cream lightened enough to freeze without turning solid. Everything depends on the meringue being genuinely Italian and genuinely cold.
- What "Italian meringue" means hereEgg whites whipped while a hot sugar syrup, boiled to somewhere between the soft- and firm-ball stage (roughly 240-248F), is poured in a thin stream, then beaten until the bowl is cool. The hot syrup partly cooks the whites, though it does not reliably pasteurise them. A French meringue of raw whites and sugar will not behave the same way.
- "Two whites" is a quantity, not a count"Two whites" -- Best read as meringue made from two egg whites rather than two separate meringues. A common working proportion is about twice the whites' weight in sugar -- roughly 60 g of whites to 120 g sugar and 40 g water -- but the recipe specifies none of this, and the finished volume will vary with how it is beaten.
- Vanilla sugarOne ounce is about two tablespoons. Vanilla sugar was commonly made by storing caster sugar with a split bean; a teaspoon of good vanilla extract plus two tablespoons of sugar is the practical substitute, though the flavour is flatter.
- Whipped creamA pint is two cups of heavy cream. Soft-to-medium peaks fold in most easily; whipped hard, the cream is liable to break when folded into the meringue and the mixture may freeze grainy. The recipe says only "thoroughly whipped", so how far to take it is a matter of judgement.
- Folding orderFold the vanilla sugar into the cold meringue first, then fold the meringue into the cream in three additions. Losing the air here is the one failure that cannot be corrected, since nothing churns the mixture later.
- Ice and salt"Pounded ice mixed with salt" is the old freezing bath: roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, which drops well below 32F. A modern freezer at 0F does the same work. Bury the covered mould so the ice comes up its sides, and top up as it melts.
- Timing and unmouldingReckon on four hours in a freezer for a one-quart mould, longer in an ice bath. Dip the mould two or three seconds in warm water and invert; let the turned-out sweet stand five minutes before serving so the surface is not icy.
- YieldDepends on how much air is retained, but two cups of whipped cream plus the meringue makes appreciably more than a quart. It softens faster than churned ice-cream, so plate it straight from the mould.
The Waldorf's kitchen was working in the French idiom, and this is the classic soufflé glacé: not a soufflé at all, but a still-frozen cream given its lift by meringue rather than by heat and eggs. Before mechanical refrigeration reached hotel pantries, frozen sweets were set in moulds packed into pounded ice and salt as Oscar describes, and the distinction between a churned ice-cream and a still-frozen one was a distinction of equipment as much as of style. Vanilla sugar, made by burying a bean in a jar of caster sugar, was one ordinary way a professional kitchen kept vanilla to hand. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book, which assumes a cook who already knows how to boil a syrup to the ball stage.