No. 3539

Alexandria

Have in a tin basin ten raw egg-yolks and twelve ounces of sugar; beat both well together, diluting with a quart of boiling milk, adding the peel of one orange. Set this on a slow fire, stir and cook until the preparation covers the spatula, then leave to cool off. Add the pulp of four bananas, one pint of cream and two gills of vanilla syrup at thirty-two degrees; strain through a sieve, freeze and mix into this ice one gill of Curacoa and half as much whipped cream. With this frozen preparation fill some crescent-shaped molds, pack in ice and freeze for half an hour. Unmold and decorate each side with lozenges of angelica and candied cherries, and stand them on whipped cream having had crushed macaroons soaked in maraschino mingled in.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's banana custard ice, molded into crescents and set on a macaroon-and-maraschino cream. The recipe assumes a professional pastry kitchen: a syrup measured by hydrometer, tin molds packed in ice and salt, and no temperatures anywhere.

The hinge: cook the custard, then chill it hard"Until the preparation covers the spatula" is nappe — about 180F, when the custard coats the back of a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean line. Take it off there; a few degrees more and ten yolks will scramble. Chill overnight before churning, both for texture and because the mix must be cold to freeze properly.
Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of vanilla syrup is one cup, one gill of Curaçao is half a cup, half as much whipped cream is a quarter cup. The quart of milk and pint of cream are standard US measures.
Syrup at thirty-two degreesThis is a density reading taken with a saccharometer, not a temperature. On the Baume scale thirty-two degrees is a heavy syrup of roughly 59 percent sugar by weight - near two parts sugar to one and a half parts water, boiled to dissolve. Ranhofer gives syrup strengths in degrees elsewhere in the book.
Curaçao and freezing pointCuracao and freezing point -- Half a cup of liqueur in this quantity of base adds enough alcohol to soften the set, and it is stirred in only after the mix has been frozen. Expect the ice to stay softer than a spirit-free mix and to need longer than the stated half hour in a domestic freezer.
BananasUse fruit that is fully ripe and spotted, and purée it into the custard at the last moment before straining — banana pulp browns fast. Four bananas is roughly 1 1/2 cups of pulp.
Molds and packing"Pack in ice" means a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt around sealed metal molds. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job; use small metal or silicone molds, press the ice in with no air pockets, and dip briefly in warm water to unmold.
AngelicaCandied angelica stems, cut into diamonds, were the standard green garnish of the period. Specialist confectioners still sell it; candied citron or pistachio gives the same effect if it cannot be found.
YieldRoughly two quarts of finished ice before molding — twelve to sixteen restaurant portions, which is the scale Ranhofer was working at.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice chapter runs to dozens of numbered compositions named for places, patrons and occasions - Alaska Florida sits immediately before this one in the same list. The name Alexandria is decorative rather than descriptive; no particular connection to the Egyptian city is claimed in the text. What is worth noticing is the banana: by the 1890s the fruit had become reliably available in eastern American cities through the steamship trade with Central America and the Caribbean, built up over the preceding two decades, and it was still uncommon enough in high-end frozen desserts to be worth remarking on. The crescent mold, the angelica lozenges and the bed of macaroon cream are ordinary Franco-American restaurant practice of the period, when an ice was expected to arrive as an assembled object rather than a scoop.