Infuse for three hours in one quart of boiling syrup ten ounces of torrefied fresh cocoa and half a stick of vanilla; add the juice of four lemons and one bottleful of good white wine; bring to twenty-two degrees, then freeze; incorporate, just when ready to serve, two gills of brandy and a gill of rum; with this preparation fill a dice box and serve at once. The box and dice should be of gum paste (No. 3624) or pasteboard.
A wine-and-cocoa sorbet from Charles Ranhofer's Delmonico's repertoire, meant to be served mid-meal in an edible dice box. The measurements assume a professional pastry kitchen with a saccharometer and a hand-cranked freezer, and the alcohol load is the thing that will trip you up.
Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this sorbet belongs to the most theatrical corner of that book: the mid-meal ice, served between the entrees and the roast to reset the palate, dressed up as a piece of tableside spectacle. Mephisto is Mephistopheles, and Gounod's Faust was among the most performed operas in New York in those decades, so the allusion is a likely one, though Ranhofer says nothing about his source; a dark chocolate ice with a spirituous bite would have been an easy joke, and the gum-paste dice box suits a figure who deals in wagers and pacts. Ranhofer's neighbouring numbers include a Paradise Sherbet, so the pairing appears deliberate. The use of roasted cocoa beans rather than powder is worth noting: Dutched cocoa powder existed by then, and infusing nibs in syrup gives a different, lighter chocolate flavour of the sort modern pastry cooks have returned to.