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Vanilla Ice Cream
1 quart cream. 1/2 tablespoons vanilla.
PROCESS: Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water three minutes. Cool slightly and add to cream, add vanilla and freeze in the usual way. Pack in a brick-shape mold. Bury in salt and ice, let stand several hours. Remove from mold to serving platter and pour around each portion Hot Chocolate Sauce.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooked custard — from a book that assumed its reader owned a crank freezer and knew what to do with it. Two of the quantities are missing or garbled in the original, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The missing sugar and waterThe ingredient list gives only cream and vanilla, yet the method calls for a boiled sugar syrup; the amounts appear to have been dropped. For a quart of cream, something in the range of 3/4 to 1 cup sugar dissolved in about 1/2 cup water is a reasonable reconstruction. Do not guess low: sugar lowers the freezing point, so an under-sweetened mixture also freezes harder.
- "1/2 tablespoons vanilla"The plural suggests a leading numeral has been lost, and 1 1/2 tablespoons is the likely reading. With a strong modern extract, 1 tablespoon for a quart of cream is ample.
- Cool the syrup properly"Cool slightly" is optimistic. A mixture that goes into the freezer warm freezes slowly and coarsely. Chill the syrup and cream mixture thoroughly -- an hour in the refrigerator -- before it goes into the machine.
- "Freeze in the usual way"This means a crank or bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, churned until the dasher drags. A modern electric machine with a pre-frozen bowl does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes.
- Packing the moldThe several hours buried in salt and ice is the ripening stage, and it is what turns soft churned cream into something that slices. A freezer at 0F does this work now; press the ice cream into a loaf pan, cover tightly against ice crystals, and give it four hours minimum.
- UnmoldingDip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled platter. A brick shape was cut into rectangular portions at the table; molded ice creams of this sort appear on old menus as brick ice cream.
- YieldA quart of cream plus syrup makes about six cups frozen, or eight servings with sauce.
- The sauceHot Chocolate Sauce is poured around each slice rather than over it. Serve the sauce genuinely hot.
Ice cream made from cream, sugar and flavouring alone o Philadelphia ice cream is a name often traced to the city's confectioners, who were long regarded as the American authority on the subject. The boiled syrup here is not a flourish but a technical necessity: sugar dissolved in cold cream leaves grit, and the dissolved sugar itself lowers the freezing point enough to keep the finished cream from setting rock-solid. That mattered a great deal when the only cold storage was a salt-and-ice pack in the cellar. 52 Sunday Dinners is organised as a year of complete menus, so this appears not as a standalone dessert recipe but as part of a dinner.