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Biscuit (Pezzo in gelo Make a cream)
(Pezzo in gelo) Make a cream with:
Water, five ounces.
Sugar, two ounces.
The yolks of four eggs.
A taste of vanilla.
Put it on the fire stirring continually and when it begins to stick to the ladle remove from the fire and whip to a stiff froth. Then mix about five ounces of ordinary whipped cream, put in a mold and pack in salt and ice.
Keep in ice for about three hours.
This dose will be sufficient for seven or eight persons. 217 1
This is a biscuit glacé — a still-frozen bombe custard, closer to semifreddo than to churned ice cream. The one thing that decides whether it works is the whipping: the hot yolk custard must be beaten until it is cold and holds a stiff ribbon before any cream goes near it, because there is no churning to build air later.
- Ounces, weight or volumeThe original almost certainly means weight throughout: five ounces water is about 2/3 cup, two ounces sugar about 1/4 cup, five ounces cream about 2/3 cup before whipping. If read as fluid ounces the proportions come out nearly the same, so either reading is workable, but it is genuinely ambiguous.
- "Begins to stick to the ladle"This is the nappe stage — the custard coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn through it, at roughly 170-175F. Much above that the yolks risk curdling, and whipping will not fully recover the texture.
- Whip to a stiff frothTransfer the hot custard to a mixer bowl and beat at high speed until it has cooled to room temperature and holds a stiff, greatly increased froth. Whipping while still warm collapses it, and folding cream into a warm base melts the cream.
- Folding the creamWhip the cream to soft peaks only, then fold in three additions. Stiffly whipped cream will not disperse and leaves streaks that freeze grainy.
- Salt and ice, or the freezerThe salt-and-ice pack is a freezing bath, not a churn: roughly one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice, replenished as it drains. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job; allow four to six hours in a metal mold, covered, and expect the surface to firm faster than the centre.
- Unmolding and servingDip the mold briefly in warm water and turn out, then let the slices stand five to ten minutes. Because the mixture is unchurned and fairly rich, it is served firm rather than scoopable. The stated yield of seven or eight is accurate for small slices.
- Vanilla"A taste of vanilla" would have meant extract or a piece of bean. About a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat, or half a bean infused in the water and sugar, matches the intent.
Pezzo in gelo — literally "piece in ice" — is the Italian name for what French pastry cooks called a biscuit glacé: a cooked egg-yolk foam lightened with whipped cream and frozen in a mold without stirring, a forerunner of today's semifreddo. The technique belongs to the era before mechanical refrigeration, when freezing meant a pewter or copper mold buried in a pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, and when a dessert that set solid without churning was a considerable convenience. It appears in Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of the early English-language collections aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking; the book generally assumes a cook who already knows what a custard should look like, which is why the instruction is a single line about the ladle. The southern Italian pezzo duro, still sold in slabs by ice-cream vendors, is generally traced to the same family of molded frozen creams.