No. 3533

Alcazar Souffles—Iced

Souffles Glaces a l'Alcazar

Fill some paper cases with the following: Pour some vanilla ice cream (No. 3458) into a metal vessel; lay it on salted ice, stirring well with a spoon, mixing in as much whipped cream, finishing with macaroons and broken chestnuts infused in maraschino; with this preparation imitate the shape of some souffles just taken from the oven. Have some pulverized macaroons sifted through a fine sieve and bestrew the souffles with this powder; cut a gash on the side, then cover with fine powdered sugar. Color quickly in a brisk oven and then put into the freezing box; pack it on ice to freeze for one hour; serve on folded napkins.

← No. 3532 Sabayon a la Denari Ices & Ice Creams No. 3534 Favart Souffles →

For the Modern Kitchen

An iced soufflé: ice cream lightened with whipped cream, shaped in paper cases to mimic a risen soufflé, flashed brown on the surface, then refrozen. Almost all the difficulty lies in keeping it frozen through the browning step.

The hinge: brown it in seconds, not minutes"Color quickly in a brisk oven" means very high heat and only a moment's exposure; Ranhofer's kitchen may well have used a salamander. A broiler set to high with the cases as close as they will go, or a blowtorch, does the same job. The moment the sugar and macaroon powder take color, the souffles go back into the freezer.
Freeze hard firstThe mixture must be set solid before it ever sees heat. Shape the cases, freeze them several hours until firm all the way through, then dust and glaze. Soft mixture will slump the instant the surface warms.
Paper casesStraight-sided souffle cases of stiff paper, filled and mounded above the rim so the finished piece looks like a soufflé that has climbed out of its dish. Modern ramekins with a paper or foil collar work, though the collar has to come off before serving.
Salted ice and the freezing boxBoth are the nineteenth-century freezer. Salted ice — roughly one part rock salt to three of crushed ice — holds a bowl well below 32F for working the mixture; the "freezing box" packed in ice is the storage freezer. A metal bowl over an ice-salt bath and a domestic freezer set as cold as it goes replace them exactly.
MacaroonsThese are almond macaroons, not coconut ones and not the sandwiched French macaron. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a shelf today: crisp, bitter-almond scented, and they grind to the fine powder the recipe wants.
Chestnuts in maraschinoCooked, peeled chestnuts broken into pieces and steeped in maraschino liqueur for an hour or more. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are fine. Maraschino here is the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable reading is equal volumes of vanilla ice cream and whipped cream, with about a cup of crushed macaroons and a cup of chestnuts to a quart of the combined base. Alcohol softens a frozen mixture, so keep the maraschino to a few tablespoons.
Yield and serviceA quart of finished mixture should fill roughly six to eight individual cases. Ranhofer serves them on folded napkins.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he cooked for some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and this is one of a long run of souffles glaces in its ice chapter — Favart, Alcazar, and others, each distinguished only by the flavoring folded into the same base. The conceit is a joke in sugar: a frozen cream dressed with macaroon crumbs and glazed sugar so that it arrives at table looking exactly like a hot soufflé, crusted and cracked, which is what the gash cut in the side is for. Names like Alcazar were attached freely to such variations in the period, generally after theatres, restaurants or fashionable places rather than any traceable origin, and Ranhofer offers no explanation for this one. The technique itself depended on a well-stocked ice house: salted ice for working the mixture, and a packed freezing box to hold it, in an age when a restaurant's ice supply was as much a capital asset as its range.