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Macaroon Ice Cream
Prepare the same quantity of macaroons. Place twelve of them on a tin and thoroughly dry them in the open oven. Remove and finely crush them. Have a vanilla ice-cream preparation and just after straining the preparation into the freezer add the crushed macaroons. Mix well with a wooden spoon, proceed to finish the ice cream in the same manner, and serve with twelve macaroons around it.
A short entry that assumes you have the book's macaroon recipe and its vanilla ice-cream base already in hand. Everything that matters here is in the handling of the crushed macaroons.
- The hinge: dry the macaroons hardAlmond macaroons are chewy in the centre, and chewy crumbs turn to paste in a cold custard. The original says only to dry them "in the open oven"; a very low oven with the door ajar answers to that. Dry the twelve on a sheet until they snap rather than bend, then crush them fine.
- What "macaroons" means hereAlmond-paste or ground-almond macaroons, close to Italian amaretti, not coconut macaroons and not the sandwiched French macaron. Crisp amaretti are the nearest supermarket substitute and dry out in the oven very quickly.
- "The same quantity"The instruction refers back to the macaroon recipe printed earlier in the book; on its own the page gives no weight. The only quantities stated here are twelve macaroons dried and crushed for the ice cream, plus twelve whole ones for the garnish.
- "Into the freezer"The freezer is the hand-cranked churn packed with ice and rock salt, not a cabinet freezer. Use a modern ice-cream maker and follow its churning time.
- When to add the crumbsThe original stirs them into the cold base before churning, which softens them into a fine flavouring throughout. If you want audible crunch instead, hold back half and fold them in during the last minute of churning.
- The custard baseA period vanilla preparation is usually a stirred egg custard, cooked to the point where it coats the spoon and then strained, though the recipe itself does not say so. If you use an egg custard, take it to 170-175F and chill it thoroughly before churning, or the eggs will neither thicken properly nor be safely cooked.
- Ripening and yieldAfter churning, hold the ice cream in the freezer an hour or two to firm. The recipe gives no yield; it specifies only that twelve whole macaroons be set around the ice cream when it is served.
Macaroon ice cream belongs to the long tradition of flavouring frozen creams with something already in the pastry cook's cupboard: crushed ratafias, praline, burnt almonds, dried fruits in liqueur. Almond macaroons had been a European confectioner's staple for centuries before this book appeared, made of egg white, sugar and almond. The instruction to serve twelve whole macaroons around the ice cream is a garnish convention of the period, when moulded ices were turned out and dressed for the table rather than scooped. The recipe is brief, telling the cook only how the macaroons and the vanilla base were combined.