No. 3484

Plombiere, Havanese Style

Plombiere a la Havanaise

Put ten egg-yolks in a tinned basin with eight ounces of sugar; beat both well together with a whip and dilute with a pint of boiling milk; cook without boiling and when the preparation covers the spoon remove from the fire and allow to cool. Now add one pint of cream and the pulp of twelve very ripe bananas. Pass all of this through a fine sieve and freeze. Then incorporate the same quantity of whipped cream, and a gill and a half of maraschino. Coat a plombiere mold with Andalusian ice cream (No. 3446); fill it quite full with the banana cream, fasten the cover on tight, pack in ice and freeze one hour for each quart; unmold and fill the hollow center in the mold with slices of raw pineapple, quartered, pared to the pulp, then macerated in maraschino. The sauce required for this is composed of apricots and maraschino.

← No. 3483 Plombiere d'Alencon Ices & Ice Creams No. 3485 Plombiere with Cherries →

For the Modern Kitchen

A banana custard ice lined with a second flavor of ice cream, molded and buried in ice. The custard base is straightforward; the assembly is where the work is.

The hinge: cook without boilingThe yolk-and-milk base must be held at roughly 170-180F, until it coats the back of a spoon. Above that the yolks scramble and no sieving will save the texture; strain into a cold bowl the moment it thickens.
A gill and a halfA gill is half a cup, so this is 3/4 cup of maraschino. That is a substantial amount of alcohol and it will soften the freeze noticeably; expect a looser set than a plain custard ice.
"The same quantity of whipped cream"Ambiguous in the original. The sense is an equal volume of whipped cream folded into the frozen banana base, which roughly doubles it. If you want a firmer plombiere, use half that.
Ten yolks, eight ounces sugarEight ounces by weight is a generous cup of granulated sugar, a little more than a level cup. With a pint of milk and a pint of cream this makes a very rich base by modern standards; it is meant to be.
Andalusian ice cream, No. 3446The lining is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book. Any firm, well-churned ice cream will line a mold if you spread it with a cold spoon against chilled metal and refreeze the shell hard before filling.
The plombiere mold and the ice packA plombiere mold is a lidded metal mold with a hollow center. "Freeze one hour for each quart" assumes packing in crushed ice and coarse salt, the usual period method; a modern freezer will do the same job, though it will take considerably longer and the timing is a matter of trial. The mold should be sealed so no air reaches the surface.
UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in cool water for a few seconds, wipe it, then invert. Warm water melts the outer coating of Andalusian ice cream and ruins the line between the two colors.
The pineapple and the sauce"Pared to the pulp" means the rind and eyes cut away down to the flesh; the original says nothing about the core. Macerate the quarters in maraschino before serving. The sauce is apricot -- puree or sieved preserve -- loosened with maraschino, served cold.
YieldHard to pin down: the base alone runs to two quarts or more before the whipped cream goes in, so the finished quantity is well beyond a single mold's capacity.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this is a dish built to be carried whole to the table. Plombieres is generally traced to the spa town of Plombieres-les-Bains in the Vosges, though by the nineteenth century the word had settled on any rich molded custard ice, usually with fruit or candied fruit worked through it. The "Havanaise" label follows the period habit of naming a dish for the origin of its most conspicuous ingredient: bananas and fresh pineapple, both of which reached New York by steamer from the Caribbean in the 1880s and 1890s, the pineapple still expensive enough to signal luxury on a menu. Maraschino, the cherry-kernel liqueur from Zara on the Dalmatian coast, appears constantly in Ranhofer's frozen desserts because its alcohol keeps a molded ice from setting to a brick and its bitter-almond note carries through the cold, which most delicate flavors do not.