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Chocolate Ice Cream
To two heaping tablespoons of best grated chocolate add one quart of thick cream, one cupful of sugar; mix the chocolate into a thin paste, using about three-fourths cup of milk; then mix all together; season with vanilla and freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just cream, sugar and chocolate churned straight down. Simple enough that everything depends on how the chocolate is handled.
- The hinge: dissolve the chocolate properlyGrated chocolate stirred into cold milk will stay gritty and settle out in the freezer. Warm the three-quarters cup of milk, whisk the chocolate in until the paste is perfectly smooth and glossy, then let it cool completely before combining with the cream.
- What "best grated chocolate" meansThis would have been a plain unsweetened cake of chocolate, grated because it was too hard to chop cleanly. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, finely chopped -- roughly 1 oz, which is about what two heaping tablespoons of shavings comes to. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here without adjusting the liquid.
- Two heaping tablespoonsGrated chocolate heaps loosely, so this is a volume measure of shavings, not of solid chocolate. Weighing is more reliable: two heaping tablespoons of gratings comes to roughly 1 oz. More than that gives a stronger, more modern-tasting chocolate, but it is a departure from the original.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" was probably close to what we would call heavy cream, though cream then was not standardised to any fixed fat percentage. Use a quart of heavy or whipping cream, unwhipped.
- SugarOne cupful in a quart of cream is not a great deal of sweetness to carry unsweetened chocolate, so taste the base before churning. Sugar also keeps the texture soft, so cutting it further will make the finished ice cream noticeably harder.
- Vanilla"Season with vanilla" means to taste — about 1 to 2 teaspoons of extract in this quantity. Add it cold, after the chocolate mixture has cooled, so the flavour is not driven off.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank bucket packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first, churn 20 to 30 minutes, then harden in the freezer for at least four hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard every 30 minutes.
- YieldThe base alone comes to close to six cups before churning, so the finished ice cream will be rather more than that: roughly eight to ten servings.
Uncooked ice creams like this one — cream, sugar, flavouring, no eggs and no stove — were known as Philadelphia style, in contrast to the richer French custard base, and American cookbooks of the period carried both. The word "grated" is the telling detail: chocolate then came as a hard, unsweetened cake meant to be scraped or grated rather than as the tempered bars and chips of later decades, and "best" was a real distinction at a time when cheaper chocolate could be cut with starch or ground cocoa shell. The instruction to "freeze" without further comment assumes a reader with access to a crank freezer packed with ice and coarse salt.