No. 3557

Lemons in Surprise

Citrons en Surprise

Pour a quart of fresh cream into a vessel, pound two ounces of sweet almonds and a few bitter almonds with twelve ounces of sugar; sift through a sieve and put it with the cream, adding two gills of maraschino and four ounces of candied fruits cut in quarter-inch squares; tint it to a soft pink, then freeze. With this cream fill some large lemons that have been emptied. Tie around with ribbons the same as shown in Fig. 689.

← No. 3556 La Grandina Ices & Ice Creams No. 3558 Leona Ice Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a frozen almond-maraschino cream served inside hollowed lemon shells, and it hinges on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food. The notes below explain what the text says and why it cannot be followed.

The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what happens when they are pounded with sugar and stirred into cream. Nothing in this recipe involves heat, so no volatile cyanide is driven off; it all goes into the frozen mixture. Unprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and many other countries, and the quantity here is unmeasured: "a few" gives the cook no way to stay inside any safe range. Use a current ice cream recipe instead.
Not the same as almond extractCommercial bitter almond flavouring and almond extract are made from benzaldehyde with the cyanogenic compounds removed, which is why they are safe and the raw nut is not. The two are not interchangeable with what Ranhofer is describing.
What the units meanFor reading the text: a gill is half a cup, so two gills of maraschino is one cup — a substantial dose of liqueur in a quart of cream, and enough to slow the freeze considerably.
MaraschinoThe maraschino of this book is the dry, clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. The liqueur supplies perfume; the sweetness comes from the twelve ounces of sugar and the colour from the tinting.
The tint"Tint it to a soft pink" would have been done with something like cochineal or a vegetable colouring; the recipe does not say. Some nineteenth-century confectioners also used mineral colours that would not pass today, so period colouring instructions are worth treating with caution.
The presentationThe lemons are emptied and filled with the frozen cream, then tied with ribbon. The lemon shell is a container, and the text refers the cook to Fig. 689 for the ribbon dressing.

A Little History

Delmonico's chef Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894, and its ices section runs to hundreds of numbered formulas because iced desserts were the closing spectacle of a fashionable American dinner. Fruit en surprise — a hollowed lemon, orange or apple refilled with an ice of another flavour and then re-dressed to look untouched — was a familiar device of French service, and it recurs through Ranhofer's book. Bitter almonds were an ordinary confectioner's ingredient in the period, used in very small quantity for the marzipan-and-cherry perfume that sweet almonds alone do not give, and period cookbooks generally treat them as a flavouring rather than a hazard. Their toxicity was known to nineteenth-century chemists, but the regulation that removed them from food shops came later, which is why recipes like this one sit unremarked in the text.