Whip 1 quart of cream with 2 cupfuls of sugar until stiff. Put in the freezer until half frozen; then add the juice and grated peel of 2 lemons, 2 tablespoonfuls of fine brandy, and a little pistache coloring. Let freeze until hard and serve with cake.
May 20 — No. 20
Italian
A simple frozen cream, closer to a semifreddo than a custard ice cream: no eggs, no cooking, just cream, sugar and flavouring taken through a freezer. Two details govern the result — when the acid goes in, and how much alcohol.
- The hinge: add the lemon lateThe recipe has you freeze the cream halfway before the lemon juice goes in. Acid added to sweetened cream can thicken or curdle it, so folding it into a half-frozen, already aerated base is likely to keep the texture smoother — though the recipe itself gives no reason for the order.
- "The freezer" is a churnIn a book of this period this means a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer — a metal canister set in a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand. A modern ice-cream machine does the same job; "half frozen" is roughly the soft-serve stage, when the dasher starts to drag.
- Whipping then churningWhipping the cream stiff first builds in air the churn would otherwise have to work for. If you use a machine, whip only to soft peaks or the mixture will be too thick to circulate.
- Pistache coloringA green colouring, taking its name from the colour of pistachio. It contributes colour rather than flavour, and the dish is complete without it.
- Brandy and freezing pointBrandy -- Two tablespoons of spirit in this quantity is small enough that its effect on the set is slight; it is there chiefly for flavour. A much larger quantity would keep the mixture from hardening.
- SweetnessTwo cupfuls of sugar to a quart of cream is heavy by current taste, and sugar also inhibits freezing. A cup to a cup and a quarter gives a firmer, less cloying result with the lemon still forward.
- Grated peelTake only the yellow zest; the white pith turns bitter in a cold, sweet mixture where there is nothing to mask it. Unwaxed or well-scrubbed lemons, since the peel is not cooked.
- Yield and servingRoughly a quart and a half to two quarts, once the cream is whipped and frozen. Ripen it a few hours in the freezer before serving; the recipe says only "cake", and the ice is quite rich on its own.
Day-a-page cookbooks like this one worked their way around the map, assigning each date a dish and a nationality, and the labels were often loose. What is called "Italian ice cream" here is a plain frozen whipped cream — the family of preparations Anglo-American cooks of the nineteenth century learned from Italian confectioners, who were prominent in the ice trade in London and New York and are often credited with giving English the word for the ice-cream vendor, the "hokey-pokey" man, though the etymology is disputed. Uncooked cream ices of this kind were faster and cheaper than the egg-custard French style, and they were common in home manuals once the crank freezer with its ice-and-salt bucket became a standard piece of kitchen equipment after the middle of the century. The pistachio tint is a period habit rather than an Italian one: green stood for a whole class of delicate dessert ices, whether or not a pistachio was anywhere near them.