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Prunelle Ice Cream
Have a vanilla ice cream but just before freezing add two tablespoons prunelle liquor.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have a vanilla ice cream recipe and a hand-crank freezer. The only real technique here is knowing how much liqueur a frozen custard will tolerate.
- PrunelleA French liqueur made from blackthorn (sloe) or wild plum, the kernels giving it a sweet almond note; the best-known style is prunelle de Bourgogne. Slivovitz or a plum brandy is drier and stronger; if you substitute, expect a sharper flavour and use less.
- Assume a quart baseThe recipe gives no quantity for the custard; two tablespoons of liqueur suits something in the region of a quart, and if you scale the base up, scale the liqueur with it.
- Why the alcohol goes in lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so it is stirred in at the end to keep the mixture churnable. Push the quantity much higher and the texture turns soft and slushy.
- "Just before freezing" in a modern machineWith an ice-cream maker this means after the custard is thoroughly chilled and just as you pour it into the machine, or in the last minute of churning. Not into a warm custard, where much of the aroma cooks off.
- The custard itselfA cooked vanilla base should reach 170-175F and thicken enough to coat a spoon, then be chilled completely, ideally overnight. A base that goes into the freezer warm churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- Old-style freezingFor a hand freezer, the usual packing is about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, with roughly 20 to 25 minutes of steady cranking.
- Ripening and yieldLet the churned cream harden in the freezer an hour or two before serving. A quart base serves six to eight.
Prunelle belongs to a family of French plum and sloe liqueurs made by steeping the fruit and its kernels in spirit, and it appears here for the same reason maraschino, kirsch and curaçao appear in period ice-cream chapters: a spoonful of imported liqueur turned a plain vanilla freezer into something with a French name for the menu. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906), an alphabetically arranged compendium of dishes for American households, leans heavily on this trick in its dessert entries, listing flavoured creams that differ from one another only in the bottle used at the end. The practice also reflects a real technical point cooks knew from experience — spirits keep a frozen cream soft.