Home › Ice Creams, Etc › Pistachio Ice Cream
Pistachio Ice Cream
Blanch and grate one pound pistachio nuts. Put one quart of spinach in a kettle and boil, drain and pound until reduced to a pulp. Squeeze the juice out through a flannel cloth. Put half a gallon of cream and a pound of sugar on to boil; stir until sugar dissolves, then set aside to cool. When cold add the nuts, flavoring, and half gallon more of rich cream. Mix in the spinach juice to color. Turn into the freezer and freeze. When hard remove the dasher from the freezer; beat the cream and set aside to harden.
A Philadelphia-style custard-free ice cream, built for a hand-crank freezer and a large household. The quantities are the first thing to deal with: as written this makes something over a gallon.
- Scale it downOne gallon of cream, a pound of sugar and a pound of nuts will fill most domestic machines several times over. Quartering the recipe gives roughly a quart of finished ice cream, which suits a 1.5-quart machine.
- Blanching the pistachiosPour boiling water over shelled nuts, let them stand a minute or two, then slip off the papery skins. Skins left on will muddy both colour and texture. "Grate" here means grind fine, not chop.
- The spinach juiceThis is colouring rather than flavour. A quart of leaves boiled, pounded and wrung through flannel yields only a small quantity of deep green liquid, and little if any of its taste will register in a gallon of cream. A fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the work of the flannel.
- "Flavoring"The book does not say what. Period pistachio ice creams were often reinforced with almond extract or bitter almond, since ground pistachios alone taste faint. A quarter teaspoon per quart of cream is enough.
- Boil, then chill thoroughlyHeating the cream with the sugar is only to dissolve it. Cool the mixture completely — refrigerator-cold, several hours — before churning, or it will never set properly in the machine.
- The freezer and the dasherThe original means a pail-and-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, churn until it holds soft peaks; the instruction to "remove the dasher" and "beat the cream" simply means to lift out the paddle and smooth the mixture down with a spatula before hardening.
- Hardening"Set aside to harden" was done by repacking the canister in salted ice under a blanket for two or three hours. A covered container in the freezer for the same period does the same job and improves the texture.
- YieldThe full recipe serves about twenty-five; the quartered version, six.
In American cookbooks pistachios and almonds were the two prestige nut flavours, and green was understood to be pistachio's signature colour long before artificial dyes were cheap. Spinach juice — sometimes spinach and parsley together — was the standard nineteenth-century green, recommended in the same books for tinting cake icings and blancmange. The absence of eggs marks this as what was called Philadelphia ice cream: nothing but cream, sugar and flavouring, no cooked custard base, a style generally traced to the mid-1800s and much praised by American writers as purer than the French egg-thickened kind. The scale of the recipe, a gallon of cream at a time, reflects a period when ice cream was made for a party or a church supper and hand-cranked in quantity, not scooped from a home freezer on a weeknight.