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Almond Ice Cream
Plunge into boiling water four ounces freshly shelled, sound almonds and let boil for two minutes. Drain and peel them. Place them in a mortar and pound to a paste; add one and a half pints cold milk and half pint fresh cream. Mix thoroughly together, then transfer to a small saucepan, place on the fire and let come to a boil. Place in a bowl six egg yolks and eight ounces powdered sugar, drop in a teaspoon Swiss kirsch. Mix well for five minutes; gradually add the almond milk to the eggs, mixing well while adding it with the wooden spoon. Transfer it to a saucepan, place on a slow fire, continually mixing while heating for five minutes, without boiling. Then let cool off. Strain through a sieve into a freezer, proceed to freeze as for vanilla ice cream and serve.
LADY FINGERS (BISCUITS A LA CUILLERC) Put four ounces powdered sugar and the yolks of five eggs into a bowl. Beat thoroughly with the spatule for five minutes. Put the whites of the eggs into a copper basin and with a wire whip beat them to a stiff froth. Add to the sugar and yolks four ounces flour. Mix gently together for half a minute, and immediately add the whites; mix for one minute more and the preparation will be ready. Take a well-cleaned pastry bag, slide into it a No. 2 tube, and with a wooden spoon or small skimmer pour the preparation into the bag. When it is all in close the upper part of the bag very firmly and lay it aside for a moment. Take two separate sheets of solid brown paper, each measuring seventeen inches long by five inches wide, or the same size as the pan, and lay them on the table one beside the other. Take hold of the lower part of the bag near the tube with the left hand and the upper part with the right; press with the latter and drop the batter on the paper in straight strips three inches long by half an inch wide. Make ten of equal size on each paper, being careful to leave an empty space three-quarters of an inch between each. Then with a sugar dredge sprinkle them lightly with powdered sugar three times, at one-minute intervals between each sprinkling. When finished lift up one paper at a time, keeping it perfectly straight, and shake off the loose sugar, being careful not to let the biscuits detach from the paper. Now lay them in a pastry pan and let rest for two minutes, place in a slow oven and bake for twenty minutes or until of a light golden colour. Remove from the oven, lift from the pan and lay on a table to cool off. Have ready a dessert dish with a folded napkin, then detach the biscuits gently from the paper with the hands, dress them on the dish and send to the table.
Two recipes run together here: a French-style almond custard ice cream and the lady fingers meant to accompany it. Both are workable as written, with a few conversions.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilOnce the yolks go in, the mixture must not simmer. Hold it at 170-175F, stirring, until it coats the spoon; a few degrees past that and the yolks scramble into grains that no sieve will fix. The five-minute instruction is a rough guide, not a rule.
- UnitsA pint here is 16 fl oz, so the dairy is 3 cups milk plus 1 cup cream. Four ounces of almonds is about 3/4 cup whole nuts; eight ounces powdered sugar is a generous cup, and four ounces flour is a scant cup.
- Almonds without a mortarA food processor does the pounding, but grind the blanched almonds with a few tablespoons of the cold milk from the start. Dry-grinding drives out the oil and you lose the flavour you are extracting. Steep the almond milk off the heat for 20-30 minutes before straining for a stronger result than boiling alone gives.
- Powdered sugarPeriod "powdered sugar" means finely granulated caster sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Caster sugar is the right substitute in both the custard and the lady finger batter; use true confectioners' sugar only for the dredging.
- "Proceed to freeze as for vanilla"The original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. Chill the strained custard thoroughly first, ideally overnight, then churn in any modern machine. Kirsch is only a teaspoon, so it will not interfere with freezing.
- Slow ovenFor the lady fingers, read 300-325F. They should dry and set to a pale gold rather than colour; twenty minutes is about right at that heat, longer if they are still tacky at the centre.
- Paper and pipingBrown paper means parchment now, cut to fit the sheet pan. Tube numbering was not standardised, so No. 2 cannot be matched confidently to a modern size; the half-inch strips imply a plain round tip of roughly 1/3 to 1/2 inch. The triple dredging at one-minute intervals is what gives the classic pearled crust, and the shake-off matters: loose sugar scorches.
- Copper basin, wire whipAn unlined copper bowl genuinely stabilises egg whites, but a clean stainless bowl with a pinch of cream of tartar does the same job. Fold the whites in quickly and stop while streaks are just gone; overmixing collapses the batter and the fingers spread flat.
- YieldThe ice cream makes roughly 1 1/2 quarts, enough for eight. The lady finger batter gives the twenty biscuits the recipe describes, from a five-egg base.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of European restaurant cookery for American households, which is why an almond ice cream arrives here with a French pastry attached and a note specifying Swiss kirsch. Almond milk pounded in a mortar is far older than ice cream itself: medieval and early modern kitchens used it constantly, and the sweetened almond-and-orange-flower syrup called orgeat kept the technique alive in confectionery long after. The accompanying biscuits are biscuits à la cuiller - spoon biscuits, said by tradition to be named for the way the batter was portioned with a spoon before piping bags became standard equipment. The two recipes simply run consecutively on the page; the dry sponge was there to be dipped, and the folded napkin on the dessert dish was the correct dining-room presentation of the day.