Home › Ices and Ice-Cream › Tea Ice-Cream
Tea Ice-Cream
Pour over four table-spoons of Old Hyson tea, a pint of cream, scald in a custard-kettle, or by placing the dish containing it in a kettle of boiling water, remove from the fire, and let stand five minutes; strain it into a pint of cold cream, put on to scald again, and when hot mix with it four eggs and three-fourths pound sugar, well beaten together; let cool and freeze. - Miss A. C. L., Pittsfield, Mass.
A cooked custard base infused with green tea, from the days when a good tea was as much a flavoring as a beverage. The whole thing hinges on temperature control at two points: the steep and the custard.
- Old Hyson teaHyson (and Young Hyson) was a twist-rolled Chinese green tea, widely sold in 19th-century America and still available from tea merchants. Any decent loose-leaf green tea substitutes; four tablespoons of leaf to a pint of cream is a strong infusion, which is the point, since it will be diluted by a second pint plus eggs and sugar.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler. The recipe already gives the workaround — set the bowl of cream in a pan of boiling water — and that is still the safest way to keep dairy off direct heat.
- Scald means about 180FScalding is heating until steam rises and bubbles form at the edge, not boiling. Boiled cream will taste cooked and can catch on the bottom.
- Do not oversteepFive minutes off the heat is deliberate. Green tea held hot much longer turns bitter and astringent, and the tannins will also give the finished cream a dry, chalky finish. Strain promptly and press the leaves only lightly.
- Tempering the eggs"Mix with it four eggs" beaten with the sugar reads as tempering: ladle some of the hot cream into the egg mixture while whisking, then combine. The recipe stops there and says to cool and freeze; if you prefer to cook the custard further, do it over the water bath and stop when it coats a spoon, around 175 to 180F, since much past 185F it will scramble.
- SugarThree-fourths of a pound is about 1 3/4 cups, noticeably sweeter than a modern ice cream custard. A cup is plenty if you want the tea to read clearly, though less sugar makes a harder freeze.
- Chill before churning"Let cool" is worth taking seriously — refrigerate the custard several hours or overnight. A cold base churns faster, incorporates more air, and gives a smoother texture in any machine.
- YieldThe base comes to roughly a quart and a half, and more than that once churned; serves six to eight. It is best within a day or two; there is no stabilizer here and it will grow icy in the freezer.
Hyson was one of the standard green teas of the American trade in the 1800s, shipped from China through Canton and graded by leaf size, with "Young Hyson" the smaller, earlier-picked sort; the name is generally traced to a Chinese phrase for flourishing spring, though the etymology is traditional rather than settled. That a Massachusetts contributor to Buckeye Cookery (published at Minneapolis in 1877, and growing out of an Ohio Methodist charitable effort) would flavor ice cream with tea suits the period's pantry: vanilla was costly and commercial extracts of uneven quality, and much of the flavoring in such books comes from what was already in the tea caddy and spice box - tea, coffee, chocolate, rose, lemon peel, bitter almond. Ice cream itself was still labor: a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, and recipes like this one assume the reader already knows what "freeze" involves.