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Glace, Mogador
Prepare a vanilla ice cream. Pour in two tablespoons rum, adding two ounces candied cherries and two ounces chopped marrons. Mix well together for one minutes. Place six macaroons on a plate, divide a tablespoon of kirsch over them evenly. Line the bottom of a quart-brick mould with a sheet white paper, fill the mould up with half the vanilla, then arrange the macaroons on top; fill up with balance of ice cream. Line the top with another sheet of paper, cover the mould tightly, bury in cracked ice and rock salt and let freeze for one hour. Remove, dip in tepid water for a few seconds, unmould on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A moulded ice cream in the French style, essentially a simplified bombe. The recipe assumes you already have a churned vanilla custard base and an ice-and-salt packing box; both need translating.
- MarronsMarrons are chestnuts; in a dessert of this date the intention is most likely marrons glaces, candied chestnuts sold in jars or as broken pieces (brisures) in autumn and winter, though the recipe does not say candied outright. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup once chopped. If you use unsweetened vacuum-packed chestnuts the result will be drier and less sweet.
- MacaroonsIn this period a macaroon meant a crisp almond-meal cookie, closer to an Italian amaretto or a plain French almond macaroon than to a modern filled macaron shell. Six of them, soaked in a tablespoon of kirsch, form the middle layer. Coconut macaroons are the wrong thing entirely.
- The hinge: mix the ice cream soft, then work fastFold the rum, cherries and chestnuts into ice cream that is still soft-frozen, at the consistency it comes out of the churn. The recipe allows only one minute of mixing; longer than that and the base warms, loses air and refreezes grainy.
- Alcohol and freezingTwo tablespoons of rum plus a tablespoon of kirsch will depress the freezing point slightly. The finished brick will be a little softer than plain ice cream and will slump sooner on the plate; there is no advantage in increasing the spirits.
- Quart brick mouldA rectangular metal ice-cream mould with a tight lid, holding a quart. An 8-by-4-inch loaf pan holds a quart or somewhat more, so fill it only to the quart mark; line it and cover the top with plastic wrap, then foil, pressed tight.
- Sheets of white paperUse parchment. The paper is there so the block releases cleanly and so the salty brine cannot seep in at the seams — the same reason the mould is sealed tightly.
- Ice and rock salt, or the freezerA pack of cracked ice and rock salt surrounds the mould with cold brine, which draws heat out far faster than cold air does; that is why one hour suffices here. A domestic freezer at 0F will do the job but wants three to four hours for a quart brick, and overnight does no harm.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in tepid water, no more, then invert onto the dish. The folded napkin under the ice cream is period service — it absorbs meltwater and keeps the block from sliding.
- YieldA quart brick cuts into six to eight slices.
Named dishes of this sort were the working vocabulary of hotel kitchens around 1900: a standard vanilla base, a spirit, a fruit and a nut, and a proper name to distinguish it on the menu card. Mogador was the French name for the Moroccan port of Essaouira, bombarded by the French fleet in 1844 and familiar enough in nineteenth-century Paris to attach itself to fabrics, to the Bal Mogador dance hall and to the celebrated dancer Celeste Mogador, who took her name from it; which of these the ice cream honours is not documented, and cooks of the period rarely explained. What the method does record precisely is the pre-mechanical dessert kitchen — the churned base finished by hand, the layered brick sealed in paper against the brine, and the pack of cracked ice and rock salt that stood in for a freezer. Moulded ices like this were the standard grand finish to a formal dinner, and the folded napkin beneath was as much a part of the presentation as the ice itself.