Baked Alaska shouldn’t work. You put ice cream in a hot oven, or hold a torch to it, and it doesn’t melt. The trick is the meringue. All those beaten egg whites trap air, and air is a lousy conductor of heat, so the outside browns while the ice cream inside stays frozen solid on its cake base. It’s a little kitchen physics dressed up as a party.
The name goes back to New York’s Delmonico’s. The story is that the restaurant named the dessert to honor the United States buying Alaska from Russia in 1867, though Delmonico’s own early version went by a better name, Alaska, Florida, for the hot-and-cold trick at its center. Baked Alaska had its big run on mid-century dinner party menus and cruise ships, then mostly disappeared. Lately it’s back, and a handful of North Texas kitchens are doing it right.
by Steven Doyle
