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Suzanne Ice Cream
Prepare and finish a quart of vanilla ice cream42). Press two peeled bananas through a sieve in a bowl, adding two tablespoons good kirsch and one ounce sugar; thoroughly mix, add to the vanilla and mix well with the spatula. Place twelve lady-fingers on a plate and pour evenly two tablespoons maraschino over them. Line a quart brick mould with a sheet of white paper, place half the ice cream in the mould, then arrange the twelve lady-fingers on top, fill up with the rest of the ice cream and tightly cover. Bury the mould in a tub well packed with ice and rock salt and let freeze for two hours, remove, lightly dip in lukewarm water for a few seconds, wipe all around, unmould on a cold dish with a napkin over and serve.
A moulded bombe in the classic French manner: vanilla ice cream enriched with banana purée and kirsch, layered around maraschino-soaked lady-fingers and packed in salt and ice. The one thing that decides success is having the ice cream already frozen and stiff before it meets the mould — soft ice cream will simply drown the biscuits and set as one solid mass.
- The cross-reference"Vanilla ice cream (42)" points to the book's own vanilla ice cream earlier in the volume. Any good cooked custard ice cream works; if your vanilla base is an uncooked one, cook the custard to 175F before churning, since nothing here is heated afterwards.
- A quart brick mouldA rectangular metal box with a close-fitting lid, on the order of 3 x 4 x 5 inches. A metal loaf pan of about 1 quart, lined with parchment and sealed tightly with foil, does the same job.
- Freezing without a mould in iceThe salt-and-ice tub is only there to freeze the packed mould below 32F. A domestic freezer at 0F does it as well; give the mould four hours rather than two, since the freezer chills by air and not by contact.
- Ice and rock salt, if you do it the old wayRoughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume brings the brine well below freezing, somewhere in the region of 0 to 15F depending on the proportions and the fineness of the ice. The brine must not reach the seam of the lid, or salt water will get into the cream.
- Kirsch and maraschinoKirsch is a dry spirit and maraschino a sweetened cherry liqueur; neither is the sugary syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The four tablespoons of alcohol in total lower the freezing point somewhat, which helps the finished brick stay sliceable rather than rock-hard -- but do not increase them or it may fail to set.
- An ounce of sugarThat is about two tablespoons. It is there to keep the sieved banana from freezing into hard grains; add it and the kirsch to the puree at once, as the sugar and spirit also help slow the browning.
- Lady-fingersSavoiardi, the dry Italian sort, hold their shape after the maraschino better than soft sponge fingers. Twelve will need trimming, and more likely than not more than one layer, to fit a quart brick.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water only — long enough to release, not to melt the surface. The napkin over the cold dish absorbs the drip and stops the brick sliding.
- YieldA quart brick gives roughly six to eight slices, cut about three-quarters of an inch thick with a knife dipped in hot water.
Ice creams and bombes named after women were a fixture of grand-hotel kitchens around 1900, when the standard flattery for a singer, actress or patroness was to attach her name to a dish. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and the shape of this recipe is pure professional restaurant work: a base ice cream made in bulk, flavoured to order, layered with liquor-soaked biscuit and moulded in a brick so it could be sliced cleanly in front of guests. The brick mould itself, buried in a tub of ice and rock salt, was the standard means of setting a composed frozen dessert before mechanical refrigeration reached hotel kitchens; the salt depresses the melting point of the ice and pulls heat out of the metal by direct contact. Banana is the period detail -- by the turn of the century steamship trade had made it cheap and reliable in American cities, and it turns up constantly in dessert cookery of these decades where a generation earlier it would have been a curiosity.