No. 3452

Nougat Ice Cream; Nougat Neapolitan Cream

Creme Nougat; Creme Nougat a la Napolitaine

Set half a pound of powdered sugar in a tinned copper pan with the juice of one lemon; place it on a slow fire, stir continuously and when melted and colored to a fine red add half a pound of unpeeled almonds and a pinch of coriander seeds; mix well. Pour this nougat on a marble and as soon as cold pound it in a mortar, moistening slowly with a pint of cream. Have ten egg-yolks in a basin with four ounces of sugar, beat well together and then add a pint of boiling milk and the crushed nougat; cook on a slow fire, stirring steadily; remove when it covers the spatula and leave till cold; into this mix a pint of cream; strain through a fine sieve and freeze.

Nougat Neapolitan Cream.—To be made with a quart of cream, fourteen ounces of sugar, twelve egg-yolks, half a pound of peeled almonds roasted to a golden brown and half an ounce of coriander seeds. Pound the almonds and corianders, wetting with two gills of cream; color with a little carmine and cook without boiling; when cold add a pint more of cream, strain and freeze.

← No. 3451 Fresh Fruit Ice Creams—Without Eggs or Cooki Ices & Ice Creams No. 3453 Peach Ice Cream a la Herbster →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two versions of the same idea: a caramelized-almond praline pounded to a paste and folded into a cooked custard. The first uses unblanched almonds in a lemon-sharpened caramel, the second toasted blanched almonds with a heavier hand of coriander.

The hinge: pound the praline fineEverything depends on grinding the cold caramel-almond slab to a genuinely smooth paste before it meets the cream. A mortar takes a long while; a food processor with the praline broken into shards, run in pulses with cream added in a slow stream, gets there faster. Grit that survives the sieve is grit in the finished ice.
"Colored to a fine red"This is caramel language, not dye. Sugar melted with lemon juice and carried to a deep reddish-amber runs roughly 340-350F; pull it the moment it smells nutty rather than acrid, since it keeps darkening off the heat and burnt caramel turns the whole batch bitter.
Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. The first recipe totals a quart of cream plus a pint of milk with ten yolks and roughly three-quarters of a pound of sugar counting the caramel; expect about two quarts of finished ice cream, enough for twelve to sixteen.
The custard"Remove when it covers the spatula" is nappe, around 175-180F on a thermometer, well short of a boil. The first version's ten yolks in a pint of milk sets fast, so pull it early rather than late to limit carryover.
Tinned copperTin melts near 450F, so a tinned pan needs watching closely on sugar work. Any heavy stainless or unlined copper pan does the caramel; use a nonreactive pan for the custard, since prolonged contact between bare copper and egg can discolour it.
CorianderHalf an ounce in the Neapolitan version is about three tablespoons of whole seed, which is assertive by modern taste. Toast the seed lightly before pounding, and consider starting with a third of that if you want the almond forward.
CarmineCochineal-based carmine is still sold as a food color, though many cooks now skip it; the coloring is purely cosmetic and the caramel already gives the first version its tint.
Freezing"Freeze" means a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt. Chill the base thoroughly overnight, then churn in a modern machine; the praline solids and high yolk content give a dense set, so let it cure two hours in the freezer before serving.
"A la Napolitaine"In period ice work the name often points to a brick or layered mold rather than to a flavour, though this page gives no molding instruction and the second version differs from the first only in its ingredients. If you want to follow that reading, pack the churned cream into a rectangular mold, freeze it hard, and turn it out to slice.

A Little History

The Epicurean (usually dated 1893 or 1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and its ice chapter is essentially the French repertoire transplanted. Nougat in this context is not the whipped egg-white confection of Montelimar but the older sense preserved in nougatine and praline: nuts bound in cooked caramel, cooled on marble, then broken and ground. Grinding that slab into a paste to flavor a custard is a technique French confectioners had used through the nineteenth century, and it survives today as praline paste. The coriander is the period detail that reads as strange now; warm spices with almond were common in French pastry of the era. "A la Napolitaine" points to the layered or brick-molded ices served in ice houses and grand restaurants, an ancestor of the tricolor Neapolitan block, and it is a reminder that before domestic freezers an ice cream's shape depended on how long it could be held packed in salt and ice.