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Ice Cream, Chambord
Prepare a pint only of vanilla ice cream. Peel and remove stones from six good-sized ripe, sound peaches. Press them through a sieve into the vanilla freezer, add two tablespoons maraschino; briskly mix with spatula three minutes. Beat up two gills thick cream to a stiff froth, add to the vanilla cream; gently mix until well amalgamated.
Place twelve lady fingers on a plate, lightly baste with a little rum. Line bottom of a quart brick mould with white paper, then fill the brick half full with the preparation. Arrange lady fingers crosswise over cream, then fill the brick with the rest of the preparation; line with another sheet of paper, place lid on, bury in the ice cream tub and freeze one hour and a half. Remove, unmould on a cold dish, take off papers, arrange a raspberry au kirsch around cream and serve.
A moulded peach-and-cream ice built on a quart of vanilla base, in the style of the classic bombes. The instructions assume an ice-and-salt freezer and a professional pantry, so a few things need translating.
- The hinge: fold, do not churnThe peach puree and maraschino go into the churned vanilla with a spatula, and the whipped cream is folded in after. Once the whipped cream is added, nothing should be beaten or run through a machine, or the air you just built goes straight back out and the finished brick turns dense.
- Gills and volumesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of thick cream is one cup of heavy cream, which whips to roughly two cups. With a pint of ice cream and the puree of six peaches added to that, the mixture will more than fill a quart mould; expect some left over.
- "The vanilla freezer"This means the metal can of the hand-cranked freezer, with the churned vanilla still in it, not a separate appliance. Any wide chilled bowl does the same job.
- MaraschinoThe liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, not the bright red cocktail cherries sold under that name. If substituting, use another clear cherry spirit rather than syrup from a jar.
- The brick mouldA rectangular lidded tin, roughly a quart loaf pan. Line the base and top with parchment as directed, and cover tightly with foil in place of the lid so the surface does not frost over.
- Freezing timeAn hour and a half buried in ice and rock salt is not the same as a home freezer. Allow four to six hours at 0F for the brick to set firm enough to unmould cleanly, then let it stand two or three minutes before turning out.
- Alcohol and setTwo tablespoons of maraschino plus rum-soaked lady fingers depress the freezing point noticeably. Be sparing when basting the biscuits, or the centre stays slack while the edges are hard.
- "Raspberry au kirsch"The recipe does not explain it; read it as raspberries steeped in kirsch, spooned around the base of the unmoulded brick. A sieved raspberry sauce with kirsch stirred in serves the same purpose.
- YieldEight modest slices from the quart brick, cut with a knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts.
Names like Chambord attached themselves to ice creams in the same way they attached themselves to sauces and garnishes in the late nineteenth-century French repertoire: borrowed from a château, a place or a patron and applied to a fixed formula that cooks were expected to recognise. In savoury cookery à la Chambord generally means a large fish braised in red wine with an elaborate garnish, so the dessert shares nothing but the borrowed name of the Loire château. What the recipe really documents is the moulded ice at the height of its prestige: a pint of plain vanilla enriched with fruit puree and whipped cream, layered with liqueur-soaked lady fingers, packed in a paper-lined brick and buried in salted ice until it could be turned out whole. Before mechanical refrigeration, that unmoulding was the point of the dish.