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Chocolate Ice-Cream
Scald one pint new milk, add by degrees three-quarters of a pound sugar, two eggs, and five table-spoons chocolate, rub smooth in a little milk. Beat well for a moment or two, place over the fire and heat until it thickens well, stirring constantly, set off, add a table-spoon of thin, dissolved gelatine, and when cold, place in freezer; when it begins to set, add a quart of rich cream, half of it well whipped.
To make a mold of chocolate and vanilla, freeze in separate freezers, divide a mold through the center with card-board, fill each division with a different cream, and set mold in ice and salt for an hour or more.
To make chocolate fruit ice-cream, when almost frozen, add a coffee-cup of preserved peaches, or any other preserves, cut in fine pieces.
A cooked custard base thinned with gelatine and enriched at the last moment with cream, half of it whipped — a common nineteenth-century trick for lightness in a hand-cranked freezer. Most of the work of translation is in the units and the chocolate.
- The hinge: cook the custard, then chill it hardHeat the milk, sugar, eggs and chocolate to 170–175°F, stirring, until it coats a spoon, and no further, or the eggs will curdle. Then chill it thoroughly — cold overnight is better than "when cold" — because a warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture.
- "Five table-spoons chocolate"This means grated unsweetened cake chocolate, not modern cocoa powder; five spoonfuls of gratings is perhaps 1-2 oz, depending how fine. If you substitute cocoa, expect a leaner result; the missing cocoa butter is part of the body of the original.
- Sugar and milk quantitiesThree-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1⅔ cups — sweet even by ice-cream standards, though sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk. A coffee-cup of preserves is about 1 cup.
- The gelatine"A table-spoon of thin, dissolved gelatine" is a spoonful of liquid gel, not a spoonful of powder — figure on about ½ teaspoon of powdered gelatine bloomed in a tablespoon of water. It is there to stabilize the churn; modern machines manage without it, and it can be left out.
- "Freezer" means the crankThe freezer is a pail-and-dasher machine packed with ice and coarse salt, about three parts crushed ice to one part salt by volume. Any modern ice-cream maker stands in for it; add the quart of cream once the base has begun to thicken in the canister, as directed.
- The whipped halfWhipping half the cream before adding it aerates a mixture that a slow crank could not aerate on its own. Fold it in gently rather than pouring it; if you are using a modern machine, adding it partway through the churn still works.
- Molding and ripeningThe cardboard-divided mold is a two-flavor bombe. "Set in ice and salt for an hour or more" is ripening: in a modern kitchen, pack the mold, cover the surface with parchment or wrap, and firm it in the freezer for 3–4 hours before unmolding in warm hands or a brief dip in hot water.
- YieldThe base comes to close to two quarts before churning, and more once frozen and aerated. Split it between batches if your machine's canister holds only a quart, since the mixture expands as it churns.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s and 80s, and its ices chapter documents a moment when ice cream had moved from confectioners' shops into ordinary households: the patent hand-crank freezer with a rotating dasher, sold cheaply from the 1850s onward, made a quart of frozen cream a Sunday possibility rather than a caterer's commission. Chocolate was still bought as a hard cake of ground cacao to be grated and "rubbed smooth" in liquid — Dutch-process cocoa powder existed but was not yet standard in American pantries — which is why the instruction is to rub rather than sift. The molded chocolate-and-vanilla bombe divided by a card partition is the domestic version of a restaurant showpiece, and the closing suggestion of chopped preserves folded in near the end is a thrifty use of the summer's canning, put back into a dish served in the same house months later.