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Plombiere, Marguerite
Prepare a pint (only) vanilla ice cream adding four ounces preserved pineapple, cut into small dices, two tablespoons maraschino and a half pint whipped cream. Mix these ingredients with the vanilla for five minutes. Line a dome-shaped quart mould with white paper, and fill it up with the mixed ice cream; lay a sheet of paper on top of the mould, cover very tightly, then bury it in cracked ice and rock salt and let freeze for two hours. Remove, uncover, turn on a dish with a folded napkin, take off the paper, and serve.
A bombe in all but name: softened vanilla ice cream lightened with whipped cream, studded with candied pineapple, and set in a mould. The whole thing depends on working fast enough that the base never turns to soup.
- Work with softened, not melted, ice creamLet the pint stand 10 minutes until it stirs like thick batter, then fold in the fruit, maraschino and cream. Five minutes of mixing is the outer limit — beyond that you lose the air in the whipped cream and the mixture goes dense.
- Maraschino means the liqueurA clear cherry-pit liqueur from Dalmatia — Luxardo and Maraska are the surviving brands. It is not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries, a later commercial product that would make the dessert cloying.
- Preserved pineappleCandied or glacé pineapple, sold in blocks at Christmas baking counters; period 'preserved' fruit could equally mean pineapple in syrup, which needs draining hard. Canned pineapple carries far too much water and will freeze into shards of ice through the cream.
- The mould and the paperA quart dome mould, or any metal pudding basin or bombe mould of that size. The paper lining is what lets you turn the frozen block out cleanly; parchment does the job better than plain white paper.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerCracked ice packed with rock salt in roughly three parts ice to one part salt will hold a mould well below freezing. A domestic freezer set to its coldest gets there with no mess, though it will likely want four hours or more rather than two.
- Turning it outDip the mould in warm water for five seconds, invert onto the chilled serving dish, lift the mould away and peel the paper. The folded napkin under the dessert is a period touch that also stops it sliding.
- YieldAbout a quart, which served six to eight at a table where this was one of several courses. Four generous modern portions.
Plombières is a frozen custard or cream studded with candied fruit and scented with kirsch or maraschino, and the name is generally traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, though the connection is traditional rather than documented — some French authorities argue the word comes instead from the lead-lined (plombé) moulds such ices were set in. By the time this book appeared, the dish had settled into the standard repertoire of hotel and restaurant cookery as one of a family of moulded ices — bombes, biscuits glacés, parfaits — that could be built ahead of service and turned out at the last moment. The addition of a personal name, Marguerite, follows the period's practice among chefs de cuisine, who distinguished dozens of near-identical moulded ices by garnish, flavouring, and the name of a patron or a singer. The instruction to bury the mould in ice and salt for two hours places it in a kitchen with an ice chest and a delivery cart rather than a freezer.