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Pistache Ice Cream
Peel and pound gently one-quarter a pound fresh pistachios; then add to it a vanilla ice-cream preparation before cooking. Proceed to cook and finish the cream exactly the same as per vanilla ice cream. Pour in one tablespoon maraschino, half teaspoon almond essence and one teaspoon kirsh; mix well and serve as you do vanilla.
The recipe assumes you already have a vanilla ice cream custard in hand; everything here hangs on getting the nut flavour into the base before it cooks. A few things need translating.
- The base it refers to"A vanilla ice-cream preparation before cooking" means the uncooked custard, which is then stirred over gentle heat until it coats a spoon and chilled before churning. The recipe gives no ingredients or temperature for that base; the pistachios steep in it through the cooking, which is where the flavour comes from.
- Quarter pound of pistachiosAbout 4 oz / 115 g shelled nuts, which is a generous amount for a quart of custard. "Peel" means blanching them briefly in boiling water and slipping off the papery skins; skins left on turn the cream a muddy brown-green rather than pale green.
- Pound gentlyThe instruction is deliberate. A mortar or a few short pulses in a food processor gives a coarse paste that releases oil and flavour; run it too long and you get pistachio butter, which makes the finished cream greasy and heavy.
- Strain or notThe original is silent. Straining the nuts out after steeping gives a smooth, pale ice cream; leaving them in gives texture. Either is faithful to the text.
- KirshKirsch, the clear cherry brandy. With the maraschino that is one tablespoon plus one teaspoon of spirit — roughly four teaspoons — in a base of perhaps a quart: enough to soften the set slightly, not enough to stop it freezing.
- Almond essenceHalf a teaspoon of modern almond extract will dominate the pistachio; a quarter teaspoon is safer if you want the nut to show.
- When to add the flavouringsStir the maraschino, almond and kirsch into the cold custard just before churning. Alcohol and volatile essences added to a hot custard cook away.
- ColourReal pistachios give a dull sage green at best, and the cooked custard mutes it further. The vivid green associated with the name comes from added colouring, which this recipe does not use.
- YieldRoughly a quart, serving six to eight, on the assumption of a standard vanilla base.
Pistachio ice cream belongs to the French and Italian confectioner's repertoire that American cookbooks of the early twentieth century borrowed wholesale. The pairing of pistachio with maraschino and kirsch is characteristic of the period's ice work: nut creams were often said to be reinforced with a liqueur and a drop of bitter-almond flavouring, partly for taste and partly because the almond note reads as "nutty" more emphatically than pistachio itself does. Pistachios reached European kitchens through the Levant and were long treated as a luxury nut, used as much for their colour in moulded ices and bombes as for flavour; the habit of tinting pistachio confections green, still with us, is generally traced to that decorative use rather than to anything the nut does on its own.