Sweeten 1 quart of milk with 2 cupfuls of sugar; let come to a boil. Remove from the fire and grate in ½ nutmeg. When cool, freeze until half frozen; then stir in 3 cupfuls of whipped cream and freeze again. Add ½ cup of rum and 1 cupful of French brandy. Let freeze until hard and serve.
August 4 — No. 4
French
A boiled-milk ice enriched with whipped cream and spiked after churning. The one thing to know before you start: a cup and a half of spirits will not freeze hard, so plan for a soft, spoonable punch rather than a scoopable ice cream.
- Alcohol and the freezerRum and brandy depress the freezing point sharply. "Let freeze until hard" is optimistic at this ratio; expect a slush at best in a domestic freezer set to 0F. Halving the spirits, or serving it in glasses as a drinkable punch, gets you closer to what the book seems to promise.
- Add the spirits last, and coldThe recipe holds the liquor back until after the second freeze, which is the hinge. Warm alcohol stirred into a partly frozen base melts it back to liquid; chill the rum and brandy first and fold them in quickly.
- Freezing without a machineFor the book's original readers this meant a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which is why the recipe assumes you can open it mid-churn. An ice cream maker works the same way: churn to soft-serve, fold in cream and spirits, then return it to the machine or the freezer.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg is roughly a rounded teaspoon freshly grated, which is assertive but correct for a punch of this kind. Grate it into the hot milk as directed so the oils infuse; pre-ground nutmeg will taste flat by comparison.
- SugarTwo cupfuls to a quart of milk reads as very sweet, but sugar is also what keeps the texture soft and prevents an icy grain. Cutting it much below a cup and a half will give you a harder, coarser result.
- "French brandy"Cognac or Armagnac. Any decent VS cognac stands in; the specification most likely served to distinguish it from domestic American grape or apple brandy.
- Whipped creamThree cupfuls means three cups after whipping, from about a cup and a half of heavy cream. Whip to soft peaks only, so it folds into the half-frozen base without deflating into butter.
- Yield and servingAbout two quarts, serving eight to ten in small glasses or punch cups. Serve immediately in chilled vessels with a little extra nutmeg over the top; it will not hold its texture long.
Milk punch is older than ice cream in any modern sense: recipes for spirits, sugar, spice and milk appear in English household books from the seventeenth century onward, sometimes clarified by curdling and straining to produce a clear, keepable cordial. By the nineteenth century the unclarified version had settled into two homes, the New Orleans breakfast glass of brandy or bourbon with milk and nutmeg, and the European table as a frozen dessert, where it overlaps with the sorbets and punch hrough through through through long formal dinners to reset the palate. The "French" label in this book is doing the work of that second tradition, and the specification of French brandy over any other rather makes the point.