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Walnut Ice-Cream
Blanch and skin one-half pound of walnut kernels, place them in a mortar with a scant tablespoonful of orange-flower water, and pound them until quite smooth, adding by degrees one-half teacupful of milk. Turn the mixture onto a wire-sieve and rub it through with a wooden spoon, having a basin underneath to catch it. Mix three-fourths of a breakfast cupful of milk with the walnuts and one-half pound of fine sugar. Stir well, add one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of thick cream, turn the mixture into a freezer and work it well. When frozen, pile the cream on a glass dish, or in small glasses, and serve at once.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooking, just nut milk, sugar and cream. The work is all in reducing the walnuts to something smooth enough to pass a sieve.
- The hinge: get the walnuts truly smoothAny grit left in the paste stays grit in the frozen cream. A food processor does in two minutes what the mortar does in twenty, but still push the purée through a fine sieve or squeeze it through a nut-milk bag; the sieving step is not optional.
- Blanching and skinning walnutsWalnut skins are tannic and bitter, which is why Oscar removes them. Pour boiling water over the kernels, let them stand a few minutes, and rub the skins off with a towel; expect to lose patience and a little yield. Skipping this gives a browner, more astringent ice cream.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cup is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so treat it as a standard cup; a teacup is smaller, about 5-6 fl oz. In practice: about 3/4 cup milk with the nuts, a scant 1/4 to 1/3 cup milk during pounding (half a teacup), and 1 1/2 cups heavy cream.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is about 1 1/8 cups granulated — a lot, but sugar is what keeps an eggless ice cream from freezing into a brick. "Fine sugar" here means finely granulated, not powdered sugar with its cornstarch.
- Half a pound of walnut kernelsAbout 2 cups of shelled halves, which yields a strongly flavoured base. Weigh after shelling, not before.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in the baking or Middle Eastern aisle. It is potent and varies by brand; start with two teaspoons rather than a full scant tablespoon and taste the unfrozen base.
- "Turn into a freezer and work it well"The original means a hand-crank pail packed with ice and coarse salt. Any modern churn works; chill the base thoroughly first, as an eggless mix churns best below 40F.
- Yield and servingRoughly a quart, serving six. Oscar serves it straight from the churn at soft-set stage — it has no stabilisers and will freeze hard and slightly coarse if held overnight.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's famous maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its ice creams were still made the way both hotels and households made them: in a pail churn packed with ice and rock salt, which is likely why this recipe insists the cream be served "at once." The recipe is eggless — what American cooks came to call Philadelphia-style — and its use of orange-flower water points back to an older confectioner's tradition, where distilled floral waters rather than vanilla extract carried the perfume of a sweet dish. Nut ice creams were a mark of a serious kitchen precisely because of the labour recorded here: pounding kernels in a mortar and rubbing them through a sieve took a good part of someone's afternoon, and a hotel with a brigade could afford it where a household cook often could not.