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Glace, Romaine
Prepare and finish a vanilla ice cream, and just before taking it up from the freezer pour in two tablespoons Jamaica rum; mix well with wooden spoon and serve.
This is a finishing instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a vanilla ice cream churning in a hand-cranked freezer. A few things in it need translating.
- "Taking it up from the freezer"The freezer here is the ice-and-salt churn, not a cabinet appliance. The rum goes in at the end of churning, just before the ice cream is scraped out of the can. In a modern machine, add it when the paddle has finished and the texture is that of soft-serve.
- No base quantity is givenTwo tablespoons of rum are specified against an unstated volume of ice cream. Household vanilla ice creams of the period were commonly a quart or more, and two tablespoons would suit roughly that; against a pint the flavour will be sharper and the set noticeably softer.
- Why the rum comes lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point. Stirred in at the start it will keep the mixture slushy no matter how long you churn; folded in at the end it flavours without preventing the ice cream from setting.
- Keep the addition smallTwo tablespoons is not timidity. Raise the quantity much beyond this per quart and the ice cream may fail to harden properly, however cold the freezer.
- The wooden spoonWood was probably specified to avoid scraping the tinned inner can. Any non-abrasive spatula does the job now.
- Jamaica rumThen as now this means a dark, high-ester pot-still rum with a pronounced funky molasses character, not a light white rum. Substituting a neutral rum gives alcohol without the flavour the recipe is after.
- Hardening and servingThe recipe says to serve at once, and freshly stirred the ice cream will be slack; if a firmer set is wanted it can be packed and left to harden. Serve in small glasses or cups rather than large scoops, in the manner of an ice served between courses.
Glace romaine belongs to the family of iced, spirit-laced ices that French service placed in the middle of a long dinner rather than at the end of it. The grander form, punch romaine, was a wine or citrus sorbet lightened with meringue and finished with rum, served as an intermezzo to reset the palate before the roast; it appears on formal menus of the period, most famously on the first-class dinner menu of the Titanic in April 1912. The version given here looks like a domestic shortcut: instead of building a punch, the cook stirs Jamaica rum into a finished vanilla ice cream, which is why the entry consists of a single sentence and assumes the reader already knows the ice cream. The name is generally traced simply to the Italian style of ices that French pastry cooks had absorbed by the nineteenth century.