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Ice Cream, Seville
Prepare a quart vanilla ice cream, squeeze in juice of a sound, juicy orange, pour in two tablespoons curacoa and mix well with spatula. Line bottom of a quart-brick mould with a sheet of white paper, drop ice cream into it, arrange a piece of paper on top, tighlty cover, then bury in ice-cream pail for one and a half hours. Remove, dip brick in lukewarm water for a few seconds, wipe all around, unmould on cold dish with a folded napkin and send to table.
A moulded ice rather than a churned one — the work is in flavouring a finished vanilla ice cream and refreezing it hard enough to turn out cleanly. Two details govern the result: how cold the base is when the liquids go in, and how much alcohol you add.
- Keep the base barely softLet the quart of vanilla soften only to the point where a spatula moves through it. If it melts to a slush, the ice crystals coarsen when it refreezes and the brick turns grainy.
- Curaçao is a freezing-point problemCuraçao lowers the freezing point -- Curaçao is usually bottled somewhere around 60 to 80 proof, and alcohol keeps the mixture from setting as hard. Two tablespoons in a quart is a modest amount; add much more and the brick becomes harder to set firm enough to unmould cleanly.
- Orange juice, one orange onlyThe juice of a single orange is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons. Strain out the pulp and pips; adding a second orange thins the base and dulls the vanilla rather than brightening it.
- The brick mouldA quart brick mould is a rectangular tin with a close-fitting lid; a small loaf pan of about a quart capacity (roughly 8x4 inches) is the nearest substitute — a 9x5 pan holds closer to two quarts. Line it fully with parchment, not just the bottom, so the block lifts out if the dip in water fails.
- "Bury in ice-cream pail"The original means packed in a wooden pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, which runs well below 32F and sets the brick in ninety minutes. A home freezer at 0F is slower and less even; give it 4 hours, and press the lid or plastic directly on the surface.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water is literal — count to five, wipe the tin dry, then invert. Longer and you get a glazed, melted exterior that will not hold the sharp edges the brick exists to show off.
- Yield and serviceA quart brick cuts into six to eight slices, depending on the proportions of the mould. The folded napkin under it also absorbs the water that beads off the ice and keeps the slices from sliding on the platter.
Ices named for places recur throughout the late nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen, where a vanilla base plus one fruit and one liqueur produced a whole column of dishes. The choice of curaçao follows a thread back to the bitter orange — the liqueur is generally traced to the dried peel of the laraha, a bitter orange descended from stock the Spanish carried to the island of Curaçao. The brick mould itself belongs to the era of the ice pail and the salt-packed freezer: before mechanical refrigeration, a rectangular block could be sliced at the table to serve a frozen sweet to a dozen people at once, and books of this kind take the tins and the ice to work them largely for granted.