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Vanilla Ice Cream
Cut a vanilla bean into small pieces, boil it in a teacup of fresh milk; when it cools add to two quarts of sweet thick cream (first strain the boiled milk); sweeten with two heaping cups of powdered sugar; beat it to a stiff froth. Put the cream into the freezer and when it begins to freeze stir from the sides with a large spoon or paddle, beating very hard. Beat every time the freezer is opened. When frozen put in a dark place and throw a blanket over it until needed.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no custard, just cream, sugar and a real vanilla bean. The only technical demands are the infusion and keeping air beaten into it while it freezes.
- Scale it downTwo quarts of cream plus the milk yields roughly three quarts of finished ice cream, more than most domestic machines will hold. A quarter of the recipe — 2 cups cream, 3 tablespoons milk, a 2-inch piece of bean, a scant 1/2 cup sugar — fits a standard 1 1/2-quart canister.
- A teacupAround 3/4 cup, not the 8-ounce cup. Precision hardly matters here since the milk is only a vehicle for the vanilla.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant granulated sugar ground fine, with no anti-caking starch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which will dull the flavor; use superfine (caster) sugar, or ordinary granulated dissolved fully in the warm milk.
- The vanilla bean is the hingeSplit the pod lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the milk along with the cut pieces, and let it steep off the heat for 20 to 30 minutes before straining. Boiling the milk briefly is enough; long boiling drives off the aromatics you are paying for.
- "Beat to a stiff froth"Do not whip the cream to peaks — it will churn to butter in the freezer. Whisk only until it is well aerated and frothy, then chill the mixture thoroughly before freezing.
- "The freezer"A hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. In a modern machine the paddle does the beating the recipe calls for; if freezing in a tub in the deep freeze, stir hard from the sides every 30 minutes until set.
- The blanketNot decorative. Period practice was to repack the churn with fresh ice and salt, cork the lid and wrap it to insulate the ice cream while it hardened and mellowed; this recipe gives only the blanket and the dark place. The modern equivalent is two to four hours in the freezer in a covered container before serving.
- ServingA full batch serves 12 to 16. Because there are no eggs or stabilizers, it sets hard and is best eaten within a day or two; let it stand a few minutes before scooping.
Ice cream made from nothing but cream, sugar and flavoring came to be called Philadelphia-style, distinguishing it from the egg-thickened French custard base; the name is generally traced to the city's nineteenth-century confectioners, who had a reputation for exceptionally rich frozen creams. The recipe belongs to the era of the hand-cranked pail freezer, patented in the United States in the 1840s and by 1900 cheap enough to be a standard piece of household equipment — which is why a book of this kind can devote a whole section to ice creams and assume the reader owns "the freezer." Its real luxury is the vanilla bean itself: still an expensive import, hand-pollinated and cured, and worth boiling in milk and straining rather than replacing with the extract that was already widely available.}