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Iced Lemon En Surprise
Prepare one pint (only) vanilla ice cream, add two gills whipped cream, one teaspoon lemon essence and mix well with the spatula. Cut six good-sized, even lemons in halves, scoop out the interiors without disturbing skins, then fill with the vanilla cream. Join them together, place in the freezer for one hour, tie a fancy ribbon around the centre with a fancy knot, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
N. B. Place in a bowl and keep the soft parts of the six lemons in the ice box for to-morrow's use.
A frozen filled-fruit dessert of the kind French kitchens called en surprise: the shell looks like a whole lemon, the inside is ice cream. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions matter, because the filling has to fit inside twelve lemon halves and no more.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of whipped cream. Take that as one cup after whipping, folded into the pint of softened ice cream.
- "One pint (only)"The parenthesis reads as a caution against overfilling: the filling has to go inside six hollowed lemons, and any more than the halves will hold means they will not close and the ribbon has nothing to hold together. Expect to have filling left over.
- Lemon essenceThis is lemon extract, and a full teaspoon of a modern extract will read as furniture polish. Start with a quarter to a half teaspoon and add finely grated zest from the lemons you are hollowing for the flavour you actually want.
- Hollowing the shellsCut through the equator, not the ends, so the two halves seat back together. A grapefruit spoon or a small melon baller takes out the segments without splitting the pith; work over a bowl and stop as soon as you reach white.
- Filling and freezingFreeze the empty shells for twenty minutes first so the filling does not slump, then pipe or spoon it in slightly domed, press the halves together and freeze upright. One hour in a home freezer firms them; two is better, and they hold for a day or two if wrapped.
- "The freezer"At this date this meant an ice-and-salt freezer rather than a modern appliance; the 'ice box' named in the N.B. is the ice chest, used for storage rather than freezing. Wrap the filled lemons or the cut cream surfaces will pick up smells.
- Ribbon and serviceTie the ribbon after freezing, when the lemons are firm, and choose one that will not bleed dye onto wet peel. The folded napkin is there to keep them from sliding; a bed of crushed ice under the napkin buys several more minutes at the table.
- Yield and the leftoversSix lemons, six servings, one per person. The reserved pulp keeps a day covered in the refrigerator and goes into lemonade, a curd or a sorbet.
Fruit en surprise was a standard trick of the late nineteenth-century professional kitchen: hollow the natural container, fill it with ice cream or sorbet, and let the guest discover the substitution. Oranges and lemons were treated this way, and the form survives in the citron givré still sold in France. The instruction to save the pulp "for to-morrow's use" and the numbered cross-references to other recipes place this in a book organised as a year of daily menus, presumably written for households running a formal table with a cook who was expected to waste nothing. Its neighbour here is a Fourth of July bill of fare with squabs, snipe and Roman punch, which is a fair picture of what a well-off American holiday dinner aspired to look like at the turn of the century: French technique, French menu French, and a dessert engineered to be carried in whole.