No. 3532

Sabayon a la Denari

Prepare a sabayon with Lunel wine, putting twelve egg-yolks in a deep saucepan with five ounces of sugar; beat well with the whip or whisk and slowly add four gills of Lunel wine and a stick of vanilla. Beat the preparation in a bain-marie or else over a slow fire until thoroughly frothy and firm, then remove from the fire and lay it on ice, continuing to beat until quite firm; mix in the same volume of whipped cream (No. 50) and with this preparation fill up some glasses in alternate layers of the sabayon and lady fingers soaked in maraschino, adding a few raspberries placed here and there. Cover the top with whipped cream and freeze in a freezing box, serving when well frozen.

← No. 3531 Sabayon a la Canetti Ices & Ice Creams No. 3533 Alcazar Souffles—Iced →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a frozen sabayon — effectively a semifreddo — not a churned ice cream, so no machine is needed. The whole thing hinges on cooking the yolks to a stable foam without scrambling them.

The hinge: cook the foam, don't curdle itWhisk constantly over barely simmering water until the mixture is thick, pale and holds a ribbon, somewhere around 165-170F. Push much beyond that and you risk the yolks scrambling and the foam breaking; "a slow fire" is a warning, not a suggestion.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so four gills is two cups of wine to twelve yolks. That is a large, loose sabayon by modern habit — expect a long beating time over the water bath before it firms.
Lunel wineMuscat de Lunel, a sweet fortified muscat from the Languedoc. Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, a Moscato di Pantelleria, or a sweet Marsala all stand in; a dry white will leave the dish thin and sour.
Sugar and yolksFive ounces of sugar is about ¾ cup by volume. Twelve yolks is a professional-scale batch — halving the whole recipe is sensible for a domestic kitchen.
A stick of vanillaOne whole vanilla bean, split and scraped. Add the pod to the wine and remove it before folding in the cream, or infuse the wine warm beforehand.
MaraschinoThe clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur (Luxardo and the like), not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Dip the ladyfingers briefly — soaked through, they collapse.
Chilling before the cream goes in"Lay it on ice" means set the pan in an ice bath and keep whisking until cold. Folding whipped cream into a warm sabayon deflates both.
The freezing boxRanhofer's freezing box is a lidded mould buried in ice and salt. A domestic freezer does the same job: freeze the filled glasses four hours or more, and let them stand ten minutes before serving, since freezing mutes both sweetness and the muscat aroma.
YieldAs written, roughly ten to twelve stemmed glasses. Use glasses rated for the freezer, or assemble in small ramekins or coupes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894), the vast record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where the Ices and Ice Creams chapter runs to hundreds of numbered variations on a handful of bases. Sabayon is the French spelling of Italian zabaglione, a whisked custard of yolks, sugar and sweet wine generally traced to Italy and usually made with Marsala; Ranhofer's choice of Lunel, a sweet muscat from the Languedoc, is a French chef's substitution, and freezing the foam with whipped cream, soaked ladyfingers and raspberries turns a warm spoon dessert into a composed iced coupe of the sort a restaurant could build in advance. The suffix "à la Denari" follows Ranhofer's habit of naming dishes for patrons, performers and public figures of the Gilded Age dining room; who Denari was is not recorded in the book itself, and the name survives only as a menu label.