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Vanilla Ice Cream
Pound half a stick of vanilla, and mix it with half a pound of sugar. Rub this through a hair sieve, and add half a pint of milk and the yolks of two eggs. Simmer the mixture over a slow fire for ten minutes, stirring briskly all the time. When cool, add a pint of cream and a small pinch of salt. Freeze and mould in the usual way. Time, ten minutes to simmer the custard. Probable cost, 2s. 4d. Sufficient for a quart of ice cream.
A plain egg-custard base with real vanilla, written for a household with an ice pail and a sack of rock salt. The quantities translate cleanly; the method needs two adjustments.
- The hinge: do not let it boil"Simmer" here means the gentle scalding of a custard, not a rolling boil. Cook it over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, until it reaches 175-180F and coats a spoon; above about 185F the two yolks curdle and no amount of stirring will bring them back.
- Imperial measuresThis book's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of milk is 1 1/4 US cups and a pint of cream is 2 1/2 US cups. Half a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated.
- Half a stick of vanillaA "stick" is a whole vanilla pod, so this is half a pod for a quart — modest by current taste. Pounding it with the sugar in a mortar is still the best method; it releases the seeds and perfumes the sugar. A full pod, or a pod plus a teaspoon of extract stirred in after cooling, suits modern palates better.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair mesh, used because it did not react with acids or discolour. Any fine-mesh strainer does the job. Sift the pounded sugar to catch pod fibres, and strain the finished custard again before chilling.
- CreamCream sold for ices was unstandardised, but was generally rich enough to stand in for modern heavy or whipping cream. Use heavy cream; single or light cream gives a thin, icy result with only two yolks to carry it.
- "Freeze and mould in the usual way"The original assumes a metal freezing pot -- pewter or tin -- packed in crushed ice and coarse salt, worked with a spatula, then the set cream pressed into a mould and buried in ice. An ice-cream machine replaces the first stage entirely: chill the custard thoroughly, ideally overnight, then churn 20-25 minutes and firm it in the freezer for a few hours.
- The saltThe pinch of salt goes into the cream, not the ice. It is there to sharpen the vanilla, and is worth keeping.
- Yield and costA quart, or about six servings. The "probable cost, 2s. 4d." reflects the price of a vanilla pod and dairy cream in the 1870s-80s.
Cassell's belonged to a generation of English cookery books written for households that bought ice by the block, from ice merchants importing it from Norway or North America and storing it in insulated wells. Freezing was therefore a set-piece skill: the mixture went into a metal pot sunk in a bucket of ice and salt, and was scraped and beaten by hand until smooth, which is why the recipe can wave at "the usual way" and expect to be understood. Vanilla itself was still costly — the pods came mostly from Mexico and, increasingly through the nineteenth century, from Réunion and Madagascar, where hand-pollination made commercial cultivation possible outside its native range. The custard base of yolks, milk, sugar and cream is the same custard the French call crème anglaise, which underpins most European ice creams to this day; what has changed is only the machine and the amount of vanilla a cook thinks reasonable.