No. 3464

Ice Cream with Pignons, Brazilian Nuts, Walnuts or Hazel-Nuts

Creme Glace aux Pignons, aux Noix de Bresil, aux Grosses Noix ou Noisettes

Cook one pound of sugar slightly wetted to three hundred and thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit or "crack" (No. 171); add half a pound of pignons or Brazilian nuts or even common walnuts or hazel-nuts; the nuts selected must be first roasted; boil once or twice in the sugar, then pour on a marble to leave till cold, when pound with a pint of cream. Break ten egg-yolks in a tinned basin, dilute with a pint of boiled milk, having already had infused in it a quarter of a vanilla stick; cook without boiling and when the preparation covers the spatula remove it from the fire, add to it the pounded nuts and cream and leave stand till cold; strain through a fine sieve and freeze as an ordinary ice cream (No. 3427).

← No. 3463 Ice Cream with Eggs and Black Coffee, Withou Ices & Ice Creams No. 3465 Ice Cream with Roasted or Boiled Chestnuts →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a nut praline folded into a vanilla custard base — the whole dish stands or falls on the caramel, which must reach true crack stage and no further.

The hinge: 338F is exactThe hinge: 338F is the figure Ranhofer gives, with "crack" as the traditional name for the same stage; a thermometer or accurate probe makes it far easier to hit. Carried well past this point the sugar starts to caramelize and can turn bitter, which cream will not hide.
PignonsPine nuts. They are oilier than the alternatives and scorch quickly, so watch them closely when roasting. Toast any of these nuts at 350F for 8-10 minutes until fragrant, then cool before they go into the sugar.
"Boil once or twice in the sugar"Stir the roasted nuts into the syrup just long enough for the mixture to bubble up again — seconds, not minutes — then pour it onto oiled marble or a silicone mat. Left longer, the residual heat carries the caramel past crack.
Pounding the pralineThe cold slab is smashed and ground with the cream. A food processor does the work of the mortar: pulse the broken praline to a coarse powder first, then add the cream and run it to a paste.
A tinned basinA tin-lined vessel of the sort used for custards. The recipe says only to cook without boiling; any heavy nonreactive bowl set over simmering water works, and is gentler than direct heat for ten yolks.
"Cook without boiling"The custard is done when it coats the back of the spatula — about 175-180F. That also takes the yolks past the point where they are safe to eat, so there is no separate concern here, but boiling will scramble them.
VanillaA quarter of a vanilla bean split and steeped in the hot milk for 15 minutes. Roughly half a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat is the substitute, though the infused pod gives a rounder flavour.
FreezingThe reference to No. 3427 points to the book's general method for freezing ice cream, which in Ranhofer's day meant a pail freezer packed in ice and rock salt and worked by hand. Chill the strained base thoroughly overnight, then churn in a domestic machine and ripen in the freezer for a few hours.
YieldA pound of sugar, a quart of dairy and ten yolks give roughly two quarts of finished ice cream — twelve to sixteen servings. The base halves cleanly if that is more than you want.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working reference set down in print, French terms and all. This recipe is a praline ice cream in the classical French manner: nuts caramelized at crack stage, cooled hard, then pulverized and worked into a custard ound the same technique that produces the almond praline of Continental confectionery, here offered with a choice of nuts as a single interchangeable formula. The recipe includes pignons and Brazil nuts alongside walnuts and hazelnuts. The precise 338F is characteristic of the book, and Ranhofer had a professional's confidence in the thermometer, giving the figure alongside the cold-water stage name 'crack'.