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Chocolate Ice Cream
Scald one quart of milk. Mix well together one and one-half cups of sugar, two tablespoons of flour. Melt two squares of chocolate, flour, sugar, etc. Then add all to the scalded milk and cook fifteen minutes. When ready to freeze, add one tablespoon of vanilla and one pint of cream.
— Mrs. Addison P. Jones
A Philadelphia-style ice cream thickened with flour rather than egg yolks — the cheaper, more forgiving custard of the period. The wording is garbled where the chocolate is melted; read it as melting the chocolate, then stirring the flour and sugar into it before it all goes into the milk.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. Modern bars are often marked in half-ounce or one-ounce sections; weigh rather than count. Semi-sweet or chips will throw the sugar badly out of balance.
- ScaldingScald means heating the milk to about 180F, just until a skin forms and bubbles ring the edge — not a boil.
- The fifteen-minute cookFifteen minutes is not excessive here because there are no eggs to curdle; the time is what cooks the raw taste out of the flour. Use a double boiler or the lowest possible heat and stir often, since the chocolate and sugar will scorch on a direct flame.
- Chill before freezingThe base must be refrigerated cold, ideally overnight, before it goes into the freezer. The original cook was working with a salt-and-ice bucket that could absorb a warm mixture; a modern machine cannot, and a warm base will churn to slush.
- The creamA pint of cream added at the end is best read as heavy cream, unwhipped, stirred in cold, though what 'cream' meant varied in richness at the time. Adding it late rather than cooking it keeps the fresh dairy flavor forward.
- VanillaA full tablespoon reads as a lot by current standards, though period extracts were likely more variable in strength. Two teaspoons of good extract is closer to the intended effect.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of base, and rather more once churned. It will freeze harder than commercial ice cream — let it sit out ten minutes before serving.
Flour-thickened ice cream bases like this one appear frequently in American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sitting between the rich egg custards of professional confectioners and the plain sweetened cream of the earliest home freezers. Eggs were seasonal and dear; a couple of tablespoons of flour did much of the same work of body and smoothness for almost nothing, and the technique was continuous with the boiled puddings and cornstarch blancmanges already familiar to home cooks. Chocolate as an ice cream flavor depended on the cake-form unsweetened chocolate sold by firms such as Baker's, scored into one-ounce squares — which is why so many receipts of the era count chocolate rather than weigh it. The attribution to Mrs. Addison P. Jones is typical of the genre: such volumes were compiled from named local contributors, and the name served as a credit for the receipt.