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Vanilla and Strawberry Ice-Cream
Pour one and one-half pints of thick cream into a saucepan with a pod of vanilla and boil it. Put one-fourth pound of sugar into a saucepan with the yolks of six eggs and beat them together; then pour in the boiled cream and stir it over the fire until thick, but do not allow it to boil or the eggs will curdle. When thick pass the mixture through a fine hair-sieve into a basin. Mix one pint of syrup at 35 degrees with one pint of strawberry puree, stirring well together; then pass it through a silk sieve. Turn the vanilla cream into an ice-mould and the strawberry mixture into another, pack them both in pounded ice and salt, and work the contents with a spatula until smooth and frozen. Cut a piece of cardboard to fit the center of an ice-mould and place it in perpendicularly, dividing the mould into two equal parts; fill one side with the vanilla ice and the other with the strawberry ice, remove the piece of cardboard and pack the mould in ice and leave it for two hours. When ready to serve, dip the mould in warm water, wipe it, turn the contents out onto a folded napkin, and serve.
Two ices, frozen separately and then assembled in a divided mould — a bombe in the professional French manner. Most of the translation work is in the syrup density and in the fact that neither ice sees a churn.
- Syrup at 35 degreesThat is 35 degrees Baumé, read with a saccharometer, not a temperature. It is a heavy syrup of roughly 65 percent sugar — in practice about 2 cups sugar dissolved in 1 cup water, boiled briefly and cooled.
- Cook the custard, don't boil itThe hinge of the recipe. Bring the cream just to a boil, temper it into the yolks and sugar, then hold the custard over moderate heat until it coats a spoon — 170 to 175F. Past about 180F the yolks scramble and the sieve will not save it.
- A pod of vanillaOne whole bean, split lengthwise and scraped, infused in the hot cream. Steep it off the heat for fifteen minutes before straining for more flavour than a straight boil gives.
- Hair-sieve and silk sieveBoth mean a fine mesh strainer. The silk sieve for the strawberry is there to catch the seeds; a fine chinois or a doubled square of cheesecloth does the same.
- Freezing without a churn"Pack in ice and salt and work with a spatula" is still-freezing: bury the mould in a bed of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, and scrape the mixture down from the sides every few minutes until it is smooth. An ice-cream machine reaches the same result with less labour; if you still-freeze in a home freezer instead, expect to scrape it every twenty minutes for two to three hours.
- MeasuresOne and one-half pints of cream is 3 cups; a quarter pound of sugar is about 115 g, a generous 1/2 cup. "Thick cream" is heavy cream at 36 percent fat or above.
- Assembling the mouldBoth ices must be frozen but still spreadable when they go into the divided mould, or the join will be ragged. Cardboard works; a strip of stiff plastic or a metal sheet cut to fit is easier to withdraw cleanly.
- Unmoulding and yieldA quick dip in warm water and an immediate turn-out — leave it in and the surface slumps. The folded napkin absorbs meltwater. The two mixtures together come to a little over two quarts, enough for ten to twelve servings.
Moulded ices like this one were the standard grand-hotel dessert of the late nineteenth century, and the divided mould filled with two contrasting ices belongs to the family of bombes and glaces panachées codified in French professional kitchens. The tell that this is a trained pastry cook's recipe rather than a domestic one is the syrup "at 35 degrees": the Baumé saccharometer was ordinary equipment in a hotel confiserie and is generally thought to have been rare in the home, where cooks are usually said to have measured sugar by the cup. Oscar Tschirky, who presided over the Waldorf dining rooms as maître d'hôtel rather than as chef, compiled the book from the house repertoire, which is why so many of its entries assume a brigade, an ice room and a stock of moulds. Freezing anything at all still meant a standing supply of block ice and coarse salt — mechanical refrigeration was reaching large hotels around this period, but the spatula-and-salt method described here is often taken to have been the common practice.