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Biscuit Tortoni
1 cup Karo, Red Label 3 egg yolks Few grains salt 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 tablespoon gelatine 1 cup heavy cream 1/2 cup macaroon crumbs Beat the egg yolks light and add to the Karo. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens about five minutes. Add the gelatine soaked five minutes in water to cover. When cool, flavor, add salt, beat into the cream, whipped, and transfer to little paper cases. Dust the tops thickly with the macaroon crumbs and put in a cold place to become firm. If possible, pack in the ice cream freezer, using equal parts of ice and salt, and put pieces of cardboard between the layers to keep the cases separate. L IFE is too short to "Cook All Day." Modern methods teach swiftness, accuracy and the use of new food products. "Pour" the Mazola for cakes, cookies, breads, instead of creaming other shortenings. Pour in the Karo -rub the pans with Mazola. You can beat these mixtures easily as well as quickly. Cooking time can be cut in half.
A still-frozen semifreddo built on a corn-syrup custard rather than a churned ice cream base. The syrup is doing structural work here, not just sweetening, so treat the proportions as fixed.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded labels; the red label was the golden syrup, as against the crystal-white blue label. Light corn syrup is the nearest current product, though the flavour will not be identical.
- Cook the custard gentlyYolks and syrup will thicken in about five minutes over low heat or a double boiler, at roughly 170-175F. The high sugar concentration raises the curdling point, but the mixture must not boil or it will scramble in streaks.
- Gelatine measureHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons, about two-thirds of a modern 1/4-oz envelope. Soften it in just enough cold water to cover, then stir it into the custard while the custard is still hot enough to dissolve it completely; grains added to a cooled base stay grainy.
- Fold, do not beatThe instruction to "beat into the cream, whipped" reads harsher than it should. Whip the cream to soft peaks and fold the cooled custard through it, or the air you just built will collapse and the tortoni will freeze dense.
- MacaroonsThese are almond macaroons rather than the coconut kind. Stale, crisp almond macaroons or amaretti, crumbed in a bag with a rolling pin, give the right sandy crunch on top.
- Paper cases and freezingPleated souffle cups, small ramekins or foil cups all work. Packing in ice and salt was a way to hold the cases well below freezing while they set, and the cardboard between layers was to keep them apart in the tub; a home freezer does the same job without either.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the mixture comes to roughly three cups, enough for six to eight small cases. The corn syrup keeps it softer than a plain frozen custard, so it needs little tempering before serving.
Biscuit tortoni belongs to a family of frozen desserts that are set rather than churned, and the name is generally traced to Tortoni, the Neapolitan who ran a celebrated ice house and cafe in Paris in the early nineteenth century; "biscuit" is often said to refer to the crushed almond macaroon or ratafia biscuit worked into or scattered over the top rather than to anything baked, though the term has also been explained by the loaf or biscuit-like form in which such frozen sweets were moulded. In American cookbooks it appears served in the little fluted paper case that made it portable and portion-sized. The version here has a commercial motive as well: the book is a promotional cookbook for corn products, and Karo syrup does double duty as sweetener and anti-crystallising agent while Mazola gets its own sales pitch in the closing paragraph. That advertising copy, with its promise that "cooking time can be cut in half," is a fair snapshot of how branded ingredients were sold to housekeepers in the early twentieth century, on speed rather than tradition.