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Walnut Ice Cream
Crack, pick out and finely chop the meat of eighteen large or twenty-four medium-sized sound walnuts.
Prepare a vanilla ice cream preparation, and when strained into the freezer add the chopped walnuts, with two tablespoons maraschino, lightly mix with a spatula, then proceed to freeze the same as vanilla.
A flavour variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a vanilla custard base and an ice-and-salt churn. Both need translating.
- How many walnuts that isEighteen large walnuts in the shell yield roughly 3 to 4 oz of kernels, about ¾ to 1 cup chopped. Shelled halves from a bag work perfectly well; buy them fresh, as the recipe's insistence on "sound" nuts is about rancidity, which is the usual fault in walnuts.
- Toast and skin themTen minutes in a 350F oven, then a rub in a towel to loosen the papery skins, removes some of the tannic bitterness and keeps the flavour from disappearing into a cold, sweet base. Cool completely before adding or they will melt the mixture.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries. Maraschino is a clear liqueur made from Marasca cherries and their crushed stones; kirsch is the closest substitute. Two tablespoons in a quart of base is a small enough quantity of alcohol that any softening of the finished texture will be slight.
- "Strained into the freezer"The vanilla preparation of this period is generally a cooked egg custard, and straining it through a fine sieve catches any set egg before churning. "The freezer" is the churn itself, not a cold cabinet.
- When to add the nutsIn a modern machine, hold the walnuts and liqueur back until the last minute or two of churning, or fold them in by hand at the soft-serve stage. Nuts added at the start bind up a narrow dasher and get pulverised.
- HardeningIce cream straight from any churn is too soft to scoop. Transfer to a chilled container and give it 2 to 4 hours in the freezer.
- YieldA standard quart of vanilla base so treated serves six to eight.
The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its ice cream chapter is arranged as a professional kitchen would arrange it: one master vanilla preparation, then a page of variations built on it. Maraschino was widely used in the confectionery of that era, distilled from Marasca cherries and their crushed stones around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, and it turns up in nineteenth-century American and European dessert cookery far more often than any cherry flavouring does today.