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Wine Ice-Cream
Put two breakfast cupfuls of cream into a saucepan with the yolks of five eggs, and prepare a custard. Pour it in a basin, let it get cold, add two wineglassfuls of white wine and sufficient syrup or sugar to sweeten, and freeze in a freezer. Stir in a little chopped preserved mixed fruits, turn the cream into a mould packed in ice, let it set, and turn it out on a cold dish for use.
A frozen custard slackened with white wine and studded with candied fruit — essentially a bombe in the late-Victorian hotel manner. Two things govern success: the custard must thicken without scrambling, and the wine must be measured, because alcohol will keep the mixture from setting firm.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is the larger of the two standard cups, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Two cupfuls is best read as 2 cups (about 500 ml) of cream, and the recipe scales sensibly at that reading.
- WineglassfulThe period wineglass is usually reckoned at 2 fl oz, so two of them is about 1/2 cup of wine. The alcohol will slow the freezing and keep the finished cream softer than a plain custard ice.
- Making the custardFive yolks to 2 cups of cream gives a rich crème anglaise. Cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring, until it coats a spoon at about 175°F (80°C), then strain into the basin at once. Above 180°F the yolks curdle.
- Chill before the wine goes inThe instruction to let the custard get cold before the wine is added is sensible: alcohol stirred into a hot custard will partly evaporate, and a thoroughly cold base churns better. Chill to refrigerator temperature, ideally several hours, before churning.
- Sweetening"Sufficient syrup or sugar" is about 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar for this volume; a cooked sugar syrup dissolves cleanly into cold custard where granulated sugar may not. Frozen desserts taste markedly less sweet than the same mixture tasted warm, so judge it cold.
- The freezerA "freezer" here is a hand-crank pail churning in a jacket of cracked ice and rock salt. Any modern ice-cream machine does the same job; churn only to a soft-serve consistency, since the alcohol prevents it hardening in the machine.
- Preserved mixed fruitsCandied or glacé fruit — cherries, citron, apricot, angelica — chopped small and folded in at the end of churning. Chopping matters: large pieces freeze rock-hard and cut the texture.
- Moulding and turning outPack the mould in ice and salt for the old method, or simply freeze it 4 hours or more. To unmould, dip briefly in warm water and invert onto a plate that has been chilled, as the recipe specifies — a warm dish will start it melting at the base immediately.
- YieldAbout 1 quart, serving six as a dessert course.
Wine ices and wine creams were a fixture of the formal dinner in the era Oscar Tschirky presided over at the Waldorf, where a frozen course served in a moulded shape was as much table decoration as dessert. The technique is straight from the French repertoire — an egg-yolk custard frozen and moulded is what a kitchen of the 1890s would more usually have called a glaçe à la crème, a bombe being the layered or lined moulded form — and the candied fruit points to the same lineage that produced tutti frutti and the various "Nesselrode" preparations then popular in New York hotels. Before mechanical refrigeration reached private houses, ice cream of this kind depended on the commercial ice trade: cut lake ice, stored in insulated houses through the summer, cracked and mixed with rock salt to pull the temperature below freezing. That the recipe assumes a mould packed in ice, rather than a freezer compartment, places it comfortably in that world, though ice-and-salt moulding persisted well after mechanical refrigeration appeared.