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Tea Ice Cream
To one pound granulated sugar put one pint of strong green tea, one and a half pints of cream, two quarts of milk and very little cinnamon water. Let the whole simmer one minute, not stirring, but keeping mixture in motion by gently moving round the pan. Freeze in the usual way. This makes quite a large quantity. One-fourth of the quantity will suffice for a small family.
Chocolate and coffee ice creams are very fine made in this way.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no custard — flavoured with strong green tea. The original yield is enormous, and the book itself suggests quartering it.
- Scale it down firstAs written this is a little over three quarts of liquid before churning, more than most domestic machines hold. The quarter batch the book recommends comes to 4 oz sugar, ½ cup strong green tea, ¾ cup cream, 2 cups milk — about a quart of finished ice cream, or four to six servings.
- One pound of sugarGranulated sugar was sold by weight, and a pound is about 2¼ cups. Weigh it if you can; the sweetness here is doing structural work, keeping the low-fat base from freezing into a solid block.
- Brew the tea cool, not boilingGreen tea steeped in fully boiling water turns bitter and astringent, and cold churning does nothing to hide it. Steep at about 175F, but steep heavily — the tea is being diluted by more than four times its volume of dairy.
- Cinnamon waterA dilute cinnamon flavouring from the druggist's shelf, closer to a hydrosol than to an extract. Substitute a few drops of cinnamon extract, or steep a small piece of stick cinnamon with the tea and remove it; ground cinnamon will leave grit.
- "Simmer one minute, not stirring"The gentle swirling instead of stirring is to dissolve the sugar and warm the mixture without scorching milk solids onto the bottom of the pan. Take it just to a bare simmer and off — sustained boiling will give the dairy a cooked, evaporated-milk taste that overwhelms the tea.
- Chill thoroughly before freezingThe recipe moves straight from the stove to "freeze in the usual way," which in a hand-crank churn meant a long spell with ice and rock salt that did the cooling. A modern machine cannot. Refrigerate the base until it is at or below 40F, ideally overnight, or the paddle will simply stir warm liquid.
- Expect a lean, icy textureWith 2 quarts of milk to 1½ pints of cream, the fat content sits at the lower end of modern ice cream, and with no eggs the result will be firmer and more crystalline than a custard base. That is authentic to the style; if you want it smoother, shift some of the milk to cream rather than adding eggs.
- The chocolate and coffee variantsThe closing line means substituting strongly brewed coffee, or chocolate dissolved into part of the hot milk, for the tea. Chocolate needs a little more sugar and benefits from being melted into the milk before the sugar goes in.
Ice cream flavoured with tea is older than it sounds: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American confectioners' books carry tea, coffee and chocolate creams side by side, all built on the same plain sweetened milk-and-cream base that Americans came to call Philadelphia ice cream because it used no eggs. Green tea, rather than black, was the ordinary tea of much of the United States well into the nineteenth century, arriving from China through the same trade that brought porcelain and silk, and only gradually displaced by black teas from India and Ceylon — so a Chicago household asking for "strong green tea" was reaching for something familiar rather than exotic. The cinnamon water points to the older overlap between the kitchen and the apothecary, where flavoured waters were bought by the bottle. The instruction to "freeze in the usual way" assumed a hand-crank freezer packed with broken ice and rock salt, supplied by the commercial ice trade that cut lake ice in winter and stored it in sawdust — which may also be why the recipe bothers to tell a small family to make only a quarter of it.