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Praline
(French Almond Ice.) Blanch, chop, and brown 1/2 pound of almonds, stir them with 4 ounces of sugar until a reddish color, then pound to a paste. Add 1 1/2 pints of boiling milk, yolks of 8 eggs, and 6 ounces of sugar. Stir till thick, add 1 1/2 ounces of gelatine, melted; strain all carefully, and add 1 pint of whipped cream. Pour into a mould and freeze 2 hours.
A still-frozen almond custard in the old bombe style, built on a genuine praline paste. Two things decide whether it works: how far you take the caramel, and how much gelatine you actually use.
- The praline is the dishBlanched, chopped, toasted almonds stirred with 4 oz sugar in a dry pan until the sugar melts and turns reddish-amber, then cooled on an oiled slab and ground to a paste. Pull the caramel off the heat the moment it is the colour of an old penny; a shade past that and the whole ice tastes scorched rather than nutty.
- Grinding to a paste"Pound to a paste" means a mortar and a good deal of patience. A food processor does it in two or three minutes, but let the caramel set hard and cool completely first, and stop before the oils separate into a loose butter.
- Gelatine, and why 1 1/2 ounces is too much nowGelatine, and why 1 1/2 ounces is likely too much now -- Nineteenth-century sheet and shred gelatine varied in strength and was not graded to a fixed standard as modern powder is, so the weight given here is not directly comparable. An ounce and a half of today's powder in this quantity of custard would be far too firm; around 2 teaspoons, softened in cold water and melted, is enough to hold a moulded frozen cream.
- Volumes1 1/2 pints of milk is 3 cups. "1 pint of whipped cream" most likely means a pint of cream after whipping, though it may have been measured before; a pint is 2 cups either way. Eight yolks with 6 oz (a scant cup) sugar makes a very rich custard base.
- Cooking the custard"Stir till thick" means over gentle heat or a bain-marie until it coats the back of a spoon, around 170-175F. Above 180F the yolks curdle; straining afterwards, as the recipe directs, catches any that do.
- Fold the cream coldChill the strained custard thoroughly before folding in the whipped cream, or the cream deflates and the gelatine sets in streaks. Fold in thirds, gently.
- "Freeze 2 hours" meant packing in ice and saltThe mould was buried in a cave or pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, which is why no churning is mentioned. In a domestic freezer allow four to six hours at minimum, and unmould by dipping the tin briefly in warm water.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts of finished mixture, serving ten to twelve. Halving the recipe is sensible for a modern household.
Praline in French confectionery means almonds cooked in caramel and, by extension, the ground paste made from them; the name is generally traced to the household of the seventeenth-century Marshal du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is traditionally credited with the sweet, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. The powdered paste became a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century pastry kitchens, turning up in creams, souffles, and above all iced puddings, where its toasted-sugar bitterness cuts the richness of an egg-yolk custard. Here it carries the parenthetical gloss "French Almond Ice," and the recipe's method is to freeze a gelatine-set cream in a mould rather than churn it.