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Christmas Ice Cream
Prepare a pint only vanilla ice cream. Place two gills thick cream in a copper basin, set basin on ice, sharply whisk cream to stiff froth, add an ounce powdered sugar, briskly beat up for two minutes longer, add to vanilla with two tablespoons maraschino and mix well with spatula. Beat up whites of three eggs to a stiff froth, adding two tablespoons fine sugar, six drops vanilla essence, and gently mix. Place a pint milk in a small sautoire with an ounce sugar, let come to a boil, take up the egg-whites preparation by spoonfuls, drop into boiling milk and let boil for two minutes. Carefully turn over, cook for two minutes more, lift up with skimmer, place on a cloth and let thoroughly cool off. Line bottom of a quart-brick ice-cream mould with a sheet of paper, drop in half the quantity of ice-cream preparation and arrange eggs crosswise on top of vanilla. Drop in balance of vanilla, arrange another sheet of paper on top, tightly cover brick, bury it in ice-cream tub with broken ice and rock salt around and let freeze for one and a half hours. Remove, immerse in lukewarm water for a few seconds, take out, wipe all around, unmould, remove papers, turn on cold dish over a napkin and serve.
A quart brick of vanilla ice cream layered with poached meringues and maraschino cream " the technique is straightforward, but the vessels and the freezing method belong to a kitchen with an ice tub in the corner.
- Two gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of heavy cream. Whipped with an ounce of powdered sugar (roughly a quarter cup by volume, since powdered sugar is light) it will roughly double, which is what keeps the finished brick light rather than dense.
- Copper basin, sautoireThe copper basin is simply a bowl set over ice for whipping; any metal bowl works, and copper is not required. A sautoire is a straight-sided shallow pan " use a wide saucepan so the meringues have room to float without touching.
- MaraschinoThis means the clear cherry liqueur from Dalmatia, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. Two tablespoons of any spirit in a quart of ice cream will slightly soften the set.
- The poached meringuesKeep the sweetened milk at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, or the spoonfuls of egg white will inflate and collapse. Two minutes a side is enough to set them through; longer makes them tough and weeping.
- Cool the meringues completelyThis is the hinge. Any residual warmth will melt channels through the vanilla layer and the brick will not slice cleanly. Drain them on a cloth until cold to the touch, and blot the undersides.
- Brick mould and paperA quart brick mould is a rectangular metal box with a tight lid; a small loaf pan of about a quart capacity, lined and covered with foil, substitutes reasonably (a 9x5 inch pan holds nearer two quarts and will give a shallow brick). Use parchment rather than plain writing paper for the sheets top and bottom.
- Freezing without an ice tubPacked in broken ice and rock salt " roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume " the brick hardens in about 90 minutes. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same job in three to four hours; the ice-and-salt bath is faster because the brine sits well below 32F.
- Unmoulding and yieldA few seconds in lukewarm water, then wipe the mould dry before inverting, or you will serve saltwater with the dessert. The quart brick gives six to eight slices, each showing the meringues in cross-section.
The dessert is built in a layered brick mould around a contrasting centre " here made with œufs à la neige, the poached meringues that French cookery calls snow eggs and English cookbooks of the period usually served floating in custard. Setting them inside a frozen brick so that each slice reveals a white oval made for a striking presentation, and the vocabulary of this recipe (sautoire, copper basin, spatula, brick mould, ice-cream tub) is professional hotel language rather than domestic instruction. Cream, ice, imported maraschino and a mould that had to be packed and turned by hand made this a holiday showpiece at a time when ice cream still meant an afternoon of labour with a salt tub. Maraschino itself, distilled from marasca cherries and generally traced to the Adriatic coast around Zadar, was one of the standard flavouring liqueurs of the late nineteenth-century pastry kitchen, valued because it perfumed cream without colouring it.