No. 3594

Hen with Chicks; Nest with Eggs (poule Avec Poussins; Nid Garni d'

Œufs

Prepare a sponge cake stand (No. 3260) or one of wood or office paste (No. 143), eleven and a quarter inches long by eight and a quarter inches wide; cover it with coffee or chocolate icing. Make a nest of spun sugar, on which place here and there small bits of angelica; in the center set the stand. Mold the hen in burnt almond ice cream (No. 3455), spotted over with coffee, chocolate, vanilla, etc., to imitate the different shadings of the bird. Pack it in ice and freeze for one hour; unmold and dress it on the stand, surrounded with small chicks, made also of ice cream, the same as the larger one.

For the nest (Fig. 720), prepare a round nest, the same as Fig. 719, only smaller; fill with small eggs made of assorted ice cream.

← No. 3593 Fruit Basket with Doves Molded Ices & Large Pieces No. 3595 Pineapple in Surprise and Pineapple Molded →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly plan rather than a recipe: Ranhofer assumes you already have the ice cream, the sugar work and the base at hand, and tells you only how to put them together. The cross-references do most of the work, so the notes below fill in what a modern cook has to supply.

What the numbers point toNo. 3260 is a sponge cake base, No. 143 is office paste — a stiff, largely inedible display dough used for stands and bases. No. 3455 is burnt almond ice cream, meaning almonds cooked to a dark caramel, ground, and infused into the custard; it is not the same as toasted almond.
The standThe recipe gives the base as eleven and a quarter by eight and a quarter inches. If you build it in sponge, ice it firmly with coffee or chocolate icing and freeze it before dressing, or the base will sag under a molded hen.
Ice cream moldsThe hen, chicks and eggs were made in hinged pewter or tin ice-cream molds, which turn up on the antique market but are rarely food-safe now. Silicone molds, or hand-shaping firm ice cream and refreezing between passes, give the same result with less trouble.
Freezing time is the weak pointPacking in an ice-and-salt brine chills faster than a domestic freezer, which is why one hour sufficed. In a home freezer allow at least six hours, and preferably overnight, before attempting to unmold a piece this size.
UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in cool — not warm — water for a few seconds, or wrap it in a cloth wrung out in hot water for a moment. Too much heat melts the surface detail that the whole piece depends on.
Spun sugarSugar spun into threads at around 310F collapses in humid air within a couple of hours, and faster still over frozen ice cream. Spin it as close to service as possible and keep it away from steam. Isomalt holds far better if the nest must stand for a while.
AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once a standard pastry green, is hard to find outside specialist suppliers. Candied citron dyed green, or thin strips of candied lime peel, read the same way at the distance this piece is meant to be seen from.
Shading the birdThe recipe asks only that the hen be "spotted over" with coffee, chocolate and vanilla to imitate the bird's markings; the simplest reading is that the contrasting ice creams were applied to the surface. Work with a soft brush and softened, well-chilled ice cream of contrasting colors, returning the piece to the freezer between each color.
Scale and servingA hen and nest on a base this size is a buffet centerpiece rather than a plated dessert. It is cut and served like any ice cream bombe once it has been admired; the office-paste stand, if you use one, is not eaten.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its final sections are given over to pièces montées — the constructed showpieces that closed a formal nineteenth-century banquet. A hen brooding over ice-cream chicks belongs to a long line of trompe-l'œil frozen work that runs back through Carême and the French office, the cold pantry where ices, sugar work and confections were made by a separate brigade from the kitchen proper. Molded ices shaped as animals, fruit and game birds fill many pages of the book, and the fact that Ranhofer gives dimensions to the quarter-inch says a good deal about how these pieces were built: to a plan, by a specialist, for a table where the dessert was expected to be looked at before it was eaten. Easter and spring menus are the obvious occasion for a hen and nest, though Ranhofer, characteristically, does not bother to say so.