No. 3554

Harlequin Ice Cream

Glace Arlequin

This ice is molded in four triangular-shaped molds; fill one with coffee ice cream (No. 3463), another with vanilla (No. 3458), another with pistachio (No. 3454) and the fourth with strawberry ice (No. 3607). Imbed and freeze for half an hour, then unmold. Put them in a brick-shaped mold three inches square. The triangles should be two inches on one side by an inch and a half in height. The mold should be eight inches long. Place the triangles in the mold, as shown in Fig. 686, having the vanilla at the bottom, one side the strawberry, the other the pistachio and keeping the coffee on the top. Press the cover down well so no empty space remains and freeze for half an hour. Now mold some chocolate ice cream in spherical molds an inch and a quarter in diameter, freeze for half an hour and unmold the whole. Cut the brick up in slices with a special knife (Fig. 700) dipped in hot water, and place each one on a four-inch square sheet of lace paper; fasten the chocolate drops exactly on the center and put them into a freezing box for half an hour before serving. All creams that are to be cut should be laid on a small board so as to facilitate cutting and removing them, and to keep them in good shape.

← No. 3553 Fromage Glace Ices & Ice Creams No. 3555 Jardiniere Cutlets →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly recipe rather than a formula: four finished ice creams plus a fifth for the garnish, built into a striped block. Read it as a diagram, and make the components from whatever reliable custard and fruit-ice recipes you already trust.

"Imbed and freeze" means salt and iceRanhofer's molds were buried in a tub of crushed ice mixed with coarse salt, which holds well below 32F and firms a mold in thirty minutes. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job, but allow two to three hours per stage rather than a half hour, or use the ice-and-salt bath if you want the original timing.
The cross-referencesNumbers 3463, 3458, 3454 and 3607 are coffee ice cream, vanilla ice cream, pistachio ice cream and strawberry ice; the three creams come earlier in the chapter, the strawberry later. Note that the strawberry is called an ice, not a cream, which would make it a fruit-and-syrup water ice set against three dairy stripes.
The mold geometryThe finished brick is 8 inches long and 3 inches square in section, filled by four long triangular prisms whose faces meet at the center. The measurements as printed are inconsistent with a true 3-inch square, so treat them as approximate and cut your triangles to fit the box you actually own. Loaf pans and silicone terrine molds work; line with plastic film for clean release.
Pack it with no voidsThis is the hinge. Any air trapped between the four prisms shows as a white seam or crumbles the slice apart when cut. Press each triangle firmly against its neighbors, press the lid down hard, and if a gap remains, fill it with a spoonful of the softest of the four.
SlicingRanhofer calls for a 'special knife' shown in Fig. 700; the text specifies only that it is dipped in hot water, and a long thin blade wiped between cuts will serve. Let the block temper five to ten minutes at room temperature first; cut straight from a deep freeze and the stripes shatter rather than shear.
The chocolate spheresSmall spherical molds an inch and a quarter across are now sold as silicone or polycarbonate chocolate-bonbon molds and work well. Fill them, freeze hard, unmold, and set one on each slice at the last moment; they soften faster than the block does.
Lace paperFour-inch squares of paper doily, laid under each slice as the recipe directs. Decorative.
Yield and serviceAn 8-inch brick cut in half-inch slices gives about sixteen; cut nearer an inch thick for eight. The final half hour 'in a freezing box' is a hold, not a step: plate the slices, freeze them firm, and carry them out at once.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked during three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its ices chapter is closer to an architecture manual than a dessert list: molded bombes, fruit-shaped ices, striped bricks with named patterns. The name comes from Arlecchino, the commedia dell'arte servant whose costume was a patchwork of colored triangles and diamonds, so arlequin came to describe any dish of contrasting colors set side by side; the tricolor Neapolitan brick, another striped ice, survived into the supermarket freezer long after this sort of thing disappeared from restaurant kitchens. Building it at all depended on the salt-and-ice technology of a nineteenth-century professional kitchen, where a half-hour setting time in a buried mold was perfectly ordinary.