FoodNet

The spirit of cookery

1895

Page 367

Presented as published in 1895. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
me of Bue de I’Ancienne Comedie ; there the first sweet ices were placed before the subjects of Louis XIV. Since that time the use of frozen preparations in warm weather to cool the body, and the use of ice and other refrigerating agents, particularly for the preservation of perishable articles of food, have been extended over all countries. Along with this extension went improvements in the means of preserving, transporting, and artificially producing ice or other agents for the production of low degrees of temperature in water or air, so that now these means are very numerous and compendious, and natural transported ice is rivalled by artificially frozen water in most large towns of the world. The equivalent for the Saxon word ice in the French language is glace, and as this has received several applica- tions in culinary art, and even been made into a verb, and as several of these applications have passed into English nomenclature, we must define these different meanings. In cookery a mere jelly was called glace for a long lime; thus 582 1 HR SPIRIT OR COOKRRY we have glace da veau and glace de ctiisson (called glaize in English) ; but the independent jellies, aspics, and sweet jellies were soon excluded from this terminology. A glace, or, as some English writers prefer to spell it, a glaze, became the name for a concentrated sauce, a consomniS of good taste, containing so much gelatine that when it was placed hot in a thin layer upon a piece of meat, or cake, or a vegetable, it adhered to it, and became set on cooling. Such articles covered with such thick shiny sauce were called glazed, whether the sauce was allowed to set or not ; but this kind of glazing had no relation to the application of artificial sources of cold, and therefore does not form part of the preparations to be discussed in the present chapter. In confectionery, glace is the name of the inspissated juice of fruit which has been preserved in such a particular manner that the juice will form a coat over it, which, shiny and adhesive at first, will become dry and crystalline in time ; such fruit is then called glaced ; it also is not to be treated of in this place. The third meaning in French con- fectioners’ language of the word glace is that corresponding to the English term an ice, being a naturally sweet or arti- ficially-sugared liquid or semi-solid transformed into a solid by artificial freezing. Such edible ice the Germans call Gefrorenes, ox frozen matter. The simplest materials for ices are sweetened fruit juices, such as lemonade, juice of cherries, of any of the fruit com- monly made iuto jams and jellies ; as they are limpid liquids in the thawed state, they are in the frozen state termed water ices ; these are the most refreshing, and least onerous to the stomach. A cheap form of these is pre- pared by dissolving the so-called acid drojw (really acidu- lated sugar-drops) in hot water, producing' a sherbet, and then consolidating this by frost ; such water ices are sold to the multitude in summer time at low prices, and contri- CO^^^OUND IC/iS .IN/) ICE PUDDINGS 5^3