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Richmond Ice Cream
Prepare a vanilla ice cream. Peel, remove stones and press through a sieve into a bowl six medium, fresh ripe sweet peaches, add to the ice cream in the freezer, with two tablespoons maraschino, and thoroughly mix with spatula. Then fill up a quart-brick ice-cream mould with the cream, tightly cover and bury it in the ice-cream tub for one and a half hours. Cut half a well-trimmed and cored pineapple in very small square pieces, place in a small saucepan with one ounce sugar, a half gill water, three-quarters gill raspberry syrup, half gill good rum, and boil five minutes. Remove and let cool off. Immerse the brick of ice cream in lukewarm water for a few seconds and wipe well. Unmould it on a cold dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A moulded vanilla-peach brick with a hot-cooked pineapple sauce served cold over it. The archaic measures are all gills, and the freezing method assumes a salt-and-ice tub rather than a freezer compartment.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. So half a gill is 1/4 cup, three-quarters of a gill is 6 tablespoons. One ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons.
- Fold the peaches in at soft-serve stage"Add to the ice cream in the freezer" means the churn, when the cream is thick but still soft. Sieved peach pulp stirred into already-hard ice cream will streak and refreeze icy; fold it in with a spatula while the base is barely spreadable, then pack immediately.
- PeachesSix medium peaches yield roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp, which is a lot of water for a quart of ice cream. Use fruit that is genuinely ripe and drain the purée if it runs, or the brick will freeze hard and grainy.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. Maraschino is a clear, dry cherry-stone liqueur; Luxardo is the usual bottling. Two tablespoons in a quart is within tolerance, but more alcohol will keep the brick from setting firm.
- The ice-cream tubBurying the mould in the tub means packing it in crushed ice and coarse salt for the ripening hour and a half. A home freezer set at 0F does the same job; give the packed mould at least three hours there, since it has no salt brine drawing heat out of the metal.
- Raspberry syrupA sweetened raspberry cordial (sirop de framboise), not seedless jam and not grenadine. A thick bottled raspberry syrup from a coffee or cocktail supplier is the closest match; failing that, cook down raspberries with an equal weight of sugar and strain.
- Cool the sauce fullyThe pineapple is boiled five minutes and then must be cold before it goes over the ice cream. Boiling also drives off much of the rum, so hold back a splash to stir in once the sauce is off the heat if you want it to read.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water, no more, then wipe the mould dry before turning it out. Chill the serving dish first. A quart brick cuts into six to eight slices.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written out of a career in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a whole genre of hotel ices named after places, patrons and rooms — Richmond here, elsewhere a Nesselrode, a Coupe Jacques, a bombe Alhambra. The names were rarely descriptive and rarely documented; a chef fixed one to a composition and it stayed if the dish sold. What defines the type is the brick: a rectangular mould, generally of pewter or tinned metal, packed with flavoured cream, ripened in a tub of ice and rock salt, then turned out whole and sliced at the table. That presentation was the point in an era when keeping ice cream firm at home was difficult, and the fruit sauce spiked with rum and maraschino is the restaurant flourish that separated a dining-room ice from what a household could manage with a hand-cranked freezer.