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Glace Constantine
Have a well-cleaned melon mould of one quart, three ounces chocolate, three ounces granulated sugar, one pint hot water, half pint cream whipped, eight egg yolks and a gill white syrup. Place the chocolate, sugar and water in a saucepan on the fire and boil for five minutes, continually mixing meanwhile; set the pan on the corner of the range. Beat up the egg yolks in a bowl with the cold syrup. Pour, little by little, the chocolate preparation into the eggs, constantly mixing with the wooden spoon while doing so. Transfer the preparation into the same saucepan, set the pan on the fire, gently mix until it bubbles, but do not allow to boil. Remove the pan from the fire and add the whipped cream, mix a little; then strain it into the freezer and freeze the same as vanilla ice cream. Fill the mould with the ice cream and close it tightly. Bury the mould in a tub with ice and rock salt and let freeze for an hour. Remove, unmould on a cold dish with a folded napkin and send to the table.
A cooked chocolate custard lightened with whipped cream, churned and then packed into a melon mould to set hard. Everything hinges on the custard: it must thicken without ever coming to a boil.
- The hinge — do not boil the custardEight yolks in a hot chocolate syrup will curdle if taken much past about 185F. The recipe's "gently mix until it bubbles, but do not allow to boil" is hard to follow literally; read as an instruction to take the custard just to thickening, it means pulling it at 175-180F on a thermometer, when it coats the spoon. Straining afterwards, as directed, catches anything that has set.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The pint of hot water and half pint of cream are US measures here, so 2 cups and 1 cup respectively.
- White syrupA plain sugar syrup rather than corn syrup. Proportions varied; make a sugar-and-water syrup and cool it completely, since the yolks are beaten with it cold so they do not begin to set before the chocolate goes in.
- The chocolateProbably unsweetened baking chocolate, which was widely sold at the time, though sweetened bars also were; if you use a sweetened bar, cut the sugar accordingly. Between three ounces of sugar and a gill of syrup the result is still dark rather than sweet by modern standards.
- Freezer and mould"the freezer" is a hand-crank churn, not the appliance. The melon mould is a lidded metal bombe mould; any tight-sealing metal mould of one quart works, with the seam sealed with butter or foil so brine cannot seep in.
- Ice and rock saltRoughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed right over the top of the closed mould. A modern freezer set to 0F will do the same job in three to four hours rather than one, and with no risk of salt water reaching the ice cream.
- UnmouldingDip the closed mould in warm water for a few seconds, wipe it dry, then invert. The folded napkin on the cold dish absorbs meltwater and keeps the bombe from sliding.
- YieldAbout one quart, which serves six to eight in the wedges a melon mould is designed to give.
Glace is simply ice cream; the personal name attached to it is the signature of the grand-hotel kitchen, where a standard custard base was varied slightly, packed in a distinctive mould and christened after a guest, a proprietor or a place. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with hundreds of such dishes drawn from the professional repertoire he had worked in, and the frozen ones tend to follow this shape: a boiled syrup, yolks, cream, a churn, then an hour buried in salted ice to harden and take the shape of the mould. The melon mould itself was a fixture of the well-equipped nineteenth-century kitchen, and the point of the exercise was as much the presentation as the flavour — arriving on a folded napkin, cut at the table into wedges that showed the dark chocolate through.