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Ice Cream Au Curacao
Prepare a quart vanilla ice cream. Pour into ice cream in freezer a quarter gill curacao, thoroughly mix with spatula and serve same as vanilla.
A two-line finishing note rather than a full recipe, and the only real technical points are the measurement and when the liqueur goes in.
- A quarter gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces, so a quarter gill is 1 fluid ounce — 2 tablespoons. That is a restrained amount for a quart, which is the point.
- "Freezer" means the churnIn Filippini's day the freezer is the hand-cranked bucket with a metal canister packed in ice and rock salt, not an appliance. In a modern machine, add the curaçao during the last minute of churning.
- Alcohol and freezing pointSpirits depress the freezing point, which may be part of why the liqueur is stirred into the finished cream rather than churned from the start. At an ounce per quart the effect on texture is slight; a much larger dose would risk a mixture that never sets firm.
- Which curaçaoOrange curaçao, clear or amber, is what is meant. Blue curaçao is the same liqueur with colouring and will tint the ice cream a startling shade; triple sec or Cointreau is a reasonable stand-in.
- RipeningIf the cream has softened during mixing, it can be packed down and left to firm again before serving; the recipe itself simply says to serve it as you would the vanilla.
- YieldA quart serves six modestly or four generously.
Curaçao takes its name from the Dutch Caribbean island, where bitter laraha oranges — a bitter orange gone feral on the island — yielded peel too harsh to eat but excellent for flavouring spirit; the liqueur was being made and exported by the nineteenth century and by 1900 was a fixture of European and American bar and confectionery work. Recipes of this kind, in which a set base is flavoured at the last moment with a spoonful of liqueur, run all through Filippini's book, which spins one vanilla batch into a page of different ices: the same quart could become au maraschino, au kirsch or au curaçao depending on the bottle reached for. Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, was writing out of exactly that professional system, which is why the instruction assumes you already have a quart of vanilla standing in the freezer.