No. 3574
Pears or Apples in Surprise
Poires ou Pommes en Surprise
Ranhofer gives four lines and assumes a professional pastry department; the technique is straightforward once the vocabulary is translated. The hinge is temperature — the shells must be frozen hard before they are filled, or the fruit weeps and the ice melts at the wall.
- "A freezer imbedded in ice"This is not an appliance but a metal pail buried in ice; for the freezing stage the recipe specifies salted ice, a mixture of crushed ice and coarse salt in something like three parts ice to one part rock salt by volume, which holds well below 32F. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job; give the hollowed shells an hour in it before filling.
- Packing to freezeThe two hours in salted ice is a hardening stage, not a churning stage. The ices go in already frozen from the churn; the packing simply sets them solid and welds them to the shell.
- Which fruit worksOranges are the reliable choice — the peel comes away from the segments in one piece and holds its shape frozen. Apples and pears have thin skins with no structural pith, so leave a good quarter-inch of flesh when you scoop, and rub the cut surfaces with lemon to stop them browning before they freeze.
- Cream ices and water ices"Cream" means a custard or cream-based ice cream; "water" means a sorbet in the French sense, sugar syrup and fruit juice with no dairy. The recipe leaves the choice open ("various ices"); matching the ice to the fruit it came from -- pear sorbet in a pear, orange in an orange -- is one obvious option rather than a documented rule.
- SocleA socle is a decorative pedestal or plinth, in Ranhofer's kitchen often carved from ice, or built up from rice paste or tallow for display work. A chilled cake stand or a shallow bed of crushed ice serves the same purpose.
- SmilaxThe florist's smilax of the period, Asparagus asparagoides, was a trailing green used purely as garnish. It is decoration, not food; any glossy edible leaf or a sprig of mint does the job on a modern plate.
- Reassembly and yieldCut a lid rather than just a hole, replace it after filling, and freeze the assembled fruit lid-down so the seam is not visible. One fruit per person; count on a scant half cup of ice per orange.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire written out at exhausting length — over 3,500 numbered items, of which this is one of the shortest. Fruit hollowed and refilled with its own ice belongs to the nineteenth-century French service of fruits givrés, frosted fruits, which were a standard cold entremets on grand menus; the "surprise" in the name is simply that the fruit looks whole until it is cut. That such a dish gets four lines while the book lavishes pages on garnishes and socles tells you where the labour went in a Gilded Age kitchen: the ice was easy, the presentation was the work. Ranhofer's casual mention of a freezer bedded in ice also marks the period — commercial ice harvesting and delivery had made frozen desserts routine in city restaurants decades before mechanical refrigeration reached them.