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Chocolate Ice-Cream
3 cups milk, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 1/2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 tablespoons hot water, 1 quart thin cream.
Scald milk. Mix flour and one-half the sugar and add eggs, slightly beaten, and salt. Add gradually to scalded milk, stirring constantly until mixture thickens, and afterwards occasionally, cooking twenty minutes. Melt chocolate over hot water, add one-fourth cup of the reserved sugar, and hot water. Stir until smooth, and add to cooked mixture. Strain, and add remaining sugar and cream. Cool and freeze, using three parts finely-crushed ice to one part rock salt.
A flour-thickened custard base, typical of American ice-cream recipes around 1900, when cornstarch or flour was used to stretch and stabilize eggs. It translates directly to a modern machine.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, not a sweetened eating bar. Use 2 1/2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate; the sugar in the recipe is calculated on that assumption.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" is light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20% butterfat. Modern half-and-half (10-12%) is thinner than intended; light cream, or three parts half-and-half to one part heavy cream, is closer.
- Cooking the custardTwenty minutes is a flour-thickened custard's cooking time rather than an egg custard's. Do it in a double boiler or over low direct heat, stirring often; with only 3 tablespoons of flour to 3 cups of milk the result is a light sauce that just coats a spoon, not a thick one.
- Melting the chocolate"Over hot water" means a bowl set over, not in, simmering water. Add the sugar and the 2 tablespoons hot water off the heat and stir to a smooth paste before it goes into the custard; adding cold liquid to melted chocolate will seize it.
- StrainingNot optional with a flour custard. Strain while warm to catch lumps of starch and any cooked egg.
- Chill before freezing"Cool" means thoroughly cold, ideally overnight in the refrigerator. A warm base overwhelms an ice-cream machine and produces coarse ice crystals.
- Ice and saltThree parts crushed ice to one part rock salt is the standard hand-crank ratio and still works in an old-style bucket churn. With a modern compressor or frozen-canister machine, ignore it entirely and churn 20-30 minutes.
- YieldRoughly two and a quarter quarts of base, more after churning; serving count depends entirely on portion size.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was one of the oldest chocolate manufacturers in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook, distributed cheaply to put the company's numbered chocolate grades into home kitchens. Many of the recipes in these pamphlets were contributed by figures from the domestic-science movement then centered in Boston, and the style shows it: precise level measurements, a flour-and-egg custard rather than a rich all-egg one, and exact instructions for the ice-and-salt mixture. Flour-thickened ice-cream bases were common in American household cooking of the period, though the reasons usually given — that they cost less than a custard carrying eight or ten yolks and were more forgiving of a cook who might curdle one — are inference rather than documented fact. The three-to-one ice-to-salt ratio was the standard taught for hand-cranked freezers, which were ordinary domestic equipment by the 1890s.