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Caramel Ice Cream
Three pints of sweet cream, one pint of good brown sugar; put in a saucepan and stir constantly until dissolved. Stir well or it will burn. While the sugar is melting, stir into it half a pint of milk. Strain the mixture, and when cold pour it into the cream, which has been well beaten. Mix well and freeze.
A short recipe that assumes a great deal of knowledge on the cook's part. The wording is muddled — the sugar is melted, milk is stirred into it, the mixture is strained and cooled, then combined with the cream — so read it through before starting.
- The hinge: melt, don't burnBrown sugar taken dry over heat goes from caramel to acrid scorch in under a minute, and the residual molasses darkens it fast. Work over medium-low heat, stir without stopping, and pull it off the moment it is liquid and smells nutty.
- Adding the milkCold milk hitting hot sugar will seize it into a hard lump and can spit violently. Warm the milk first and add it in a slow stream off the heat, then return it to low heat and stir until the caramel redissolves. The straining the recipe calls for afterward would catch any lumps that remain.
- QuantitiesThree pints of cream is 6 cups; half a pint of milk is 1 cup. A pint of brown sugar is a volume measure, roughly 14 to 16 oz packed, which is a great deal of sugar for this amount of dairy. Two-thirds of it makes a more balanced ice cream and still freezes properly.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh cream as opposed to soured or ripened cream, not sweetened cream. Use heavy or whipping cream.
- "Well beaten"Do not whip the cream to peaks. It most likely means beaten smooth and light rather than stiff; the recipe has you pour the cooled caramel mixture into the cream, and stiff cream would be knocked down again in the mixing and churning. Simply combine everything cold and churn.
- Chill before freezingThe instruction to cool the caramel mixture matters more than the text suggests. Refrigerate the finished base for at least four hours, ideally overnight — a cold base churns faster and finishes finer-grained.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, churn 20 to 30 minutes, then firm it in the freezer for two to three hours before serving.
- YieldAbout 2 1/4 quarts of base before churning, somewhat more once air is beaten in, which serves roughly 10 to 12. Halve it if your machine holds less than 2 quarts.
Caramel ice cream belongs to a family of "burnt sugar" desserts — burnt sugar sauce, burnt almond ice cream — that used caramelized sugar as a flavoring in its own right. Brown sugar rather than white gives it a molasses undertone. Ice cream itself moved from luxury to Sunday commonplace over the second half of the century, largely because the hand-cranked freezer with an inner canister and a salt-and-ice jacket became cheap and widely sold, and because urban ice delivery made the ice itself reliable. A recipe this brief, with no custard and no eggs, suggests a household that would have needed the proportions more than the method.