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Ice Cream Souveraine
Prepare half the quantity of vanilla ice cream. Crack four egg yolks in a copper basin with two ounces powdered sugar. Place the basin on the corner of the hot range, add to it half stick vanilla bean, then vigorously whisk it for fully ten minutes, or until well heated, remove and place it on the ice until cold, lightly mixing once in a while. Add half pint fresh thick cream whipped. Remove the vanilla bean and gently mix for two minutes. Have a well-cleaned ice-cream mould holding one quart; place the prepared pint of vanilla cream in the mould. Dip eight lady fingers in maraschino or rum, lay them over the vanilla, fill up the mould with the preparation, tightly close, then bury the mould in an ice-cream tub with plenty of cracked ice and rock salt and freeze for two hours. Remove and plunge the mould into lukewarm water for a few seconds, take up, nicely wipe all around, unmould on a cold dish with a napkin and serve.
This is a bombe: a moulded frozen dessert with a plain vanilla ice cream lining and a richer whipped mousse centre, layered with soaked ladyfingers. Nothing here is difficult, but the egg base and the salt-and-ice freezing both need translating.
- The hinge: cook the yolk base properly"Place the basin on the corner of the hot range" means gentle, indirect heat — the modern equivalent is a bowl over barely simmering water, whisked constantly. Take it to 160F/71C on an instant-read thermometer, which gives you both a safely cooked base and the volume the recipe is after. Direct high heat will scramble the yolks in under a minute.
- Copper basinA round-bottomed unlined copper bowl was standard for whisking egg foams. Any wide stainless or glass bowl that sits securely over a saucepan works; the copper is not doing anything you need.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this date this means finely ground sugar, not the modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Use superfine (caster) sugar.
- QuantitiesHalf pint thick cream is 1 cup measured before whipping. "Half the quantity of vanilla ice cream" refers to the book's own vanilla recipe — in practice you need about 1 pint of finished ice cream to line the mould, which is what the text later confirms.
- Vanilla beanHalf a bean split lengthwise, steeped in the warm yolk mixture and fished out before folding in the cream. A teaspoon of good extract added off the heat is a fair substitute, though it will not scent the base as thoroughly.
- Freezing without an ice tubThe salt-and-ice packing is a pre-freezer method: roughly three parts cracked ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed around a tightly lidded mould, gives a bath well below 32F. A domestic freezer does the same job — cover the mould surface with plastic wrap, lid it, and allow 4 to 6 hours rather than two, since the freezer chills far more slowly than a brine bath.
- AssemblyLine the chilled quart mould with the softened vanilla ice cream, pressing it up the sides and freezing that shell firm before the ladyfingers and mousse go in. Filling a soft-walled mould in one go, as the terse original implies, gives a muddled cross-section.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water is genuinely all it takes; longer and the outer layer slumps. Wipe the mould dry, invert onto a well-chilled plate, and return it to the freezer if it needs firming before service. The napkin is a period serving convention, variously explained as steadying the mould on the dish and absorbing the melt.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight.
Filippini's book belongs to the era when a formal dinner closed with a moulded ice, and the moulded ice carried a name — souveraine, sovereign, in the same vein as the Nesselrode, Tortoni and countless bombes titled after cities, patrons and singers. Structurally this is a classic bombe of a type often associated with the Escoffier generation, though Filippini's book predates Escoffier's published codification: a firm ice cream shell around a softer appareil à bombe, the whisked yolk-and-sugar foam lightened with whipped cream, which freezes to a mousse rather than a hard ice because of its fat and sugar. The maraschino for the ladyfingers points to the cherry liqueur of Zara on the Dalmatian coast, a fixture of American and European hotel kitchens by 1900 and quite unlike the syrup now sold under the name. The salt-and-ice tub is the tell of the period: mechanical refrigeration existed commercially, but a hotel or a well-run household still froze its desserts in a brine bath, with a tightly closed mould to keep the salt water out.