No. 3564

Mignon Ice Cream

Glace a la Mignonne

Boil a quarter of a pound of rice in water with the juice of a lemon; put it into a vessel and pour over some vanilla syrup (No. 3165) at thirty-two degrees. Place in a freezer one pint of No. 1 vanilla ice cream (No. 3458), and the well-drained rice. With this cream fill some shell-shaped tin molds; freeze and unmold after one hour, lay in the center some fresh fruits and soaked macaroons, and cover the whole with a layer of very smooth whipped cream; decorate the top with whipped cream pushed through a cornet; freeze and serve with a sauce made of apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and kirsch.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A rice ice cream built like a set dessert: rice cooked soft, steeped in vanilla syrup, folded into a custard ice cream, moulded, then dressed with fruit, macaroons and piped cream. The cross-references make it look harder than it is; nearly all of them can be handled with things you already know.

"Thirty-two degrees" is a syrup density, not a temperatureRanhofer measures sugar syrups on the Baume saccharometer. Thirty-two degrees Baume is a heavy syrup, well over half sugar by weight, boiled briefly and cooled; infuse it with a split vanilla bean. It is there to sweeten and perfume the rice, so it does not freeze into hard grains.
The riceA quarter pound is a scant 2/3 cup dry, which swells to a generous amount for a pint of ice cream. Use a short or medium grain that cooks soft; boil it well past al dente in plenty of acidulated water, then drain hard. Wet rice will ice up in the mould.
"No. 1 vanilla ice cream"Ranhofer's first vanilla is a cooked egg-yolk custard base, not a Philadelphia-style cream. Any good custard vanilla, one pint, softened to the texture of thick batter, will do here; you are folding, not churning from scratch.
Freezer means the salt-and-ice pailA freezer in 1894 is a hand-cranked canister packed in cracked ice and rock salt. The recipe's instruction to "place in a freezer" the ice cream and rice means to combine and re-chill them until firm enough to pack. A stand-mixer paddle and twenty minutes in the deep-freeze accomplish the same.
Moulds and unmouldingShell-shaped tin moulds pack and freeze quickly; a modern silicone shell or brioche mould works. An hour is the minimum, not the maximum. Dip briefly in warm water to release, then return the unmoulded shells to the freezer while you assemble.
CornetA cornet is a cone rolled from parchment or paper with the tip snipped off — a disposable piping bag. Any small star tip gives the same effect.
Soaked macaroonsThese are almond macaroons, not coconut. The recipe does not say in what they are soaked; kirsch or the apricot sauce would suit, so they soften into the fruit rather than shattering.
The sauceApricot marmalade in this book means a sieved apricot jam let down with a little syrup or water until it pours. Add kirsch off the heat and to taste; heating it away defeats the point. Serve the sauce cold, or the moulds slump.
YieldA pint of ice cream plus the rice fills six to eight small shell moulds. Assemble at the last moment — whipped cream on a frozen surface holds perhaps twenty minutes before it weeps.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole repertoire in one enormous numbered system, which is why this recipe reads as a set of references to three other recipes. The dish itself belongs to a long French line of iced rice desserts — rice cooked in sweetened milk or syrup and worked into a frozen cream — close cousins to riz à l'impératrice, the moulded rice cream that was a fixture of nineteenth-century restaurant menus. The name may be no more than a compliment — mignonne, dainty — though Ranhofer gives no gloss, and it could as easily be a proper name. What the recipe really shows is how such a kitchen worked — syrup held at a measured Baumé density, a standard vanilla base, apricot marmalade in the larder, all of it kept ready so a plated ice could be assembled in minutes during service.