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Frozen Chocolate
1 quart milk, 2 1/2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 1/4 cups sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla, Few grains salt. Put milk and chocolate in double-boiler and when milk has scalded and chocolate has melted add sugar, vanilla and salt. Chill and freeze, using three parts finely crushed ice to one part rock salt. Serve in coupe glasses and garnish tops with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
A plain frozen chocolate custard-less ice, made with milk alone and churned in a hand-crank freezer. It works in a modern machine with almost no change, though the texture tells you it was never meant to be scooped from a tub.
- The chocolatePremium No. 1 was Baker's unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in 1-ounce squares; 2 1/2 squares is 2 1/2 oz. Any unsweetened baking chocolate substitutes directly. Do not use semisweet or the 1 1/4 cups sugar will overwhelm it.
- Melt it smooth before the sugar goes inThis is the hinge. Chocolate dropped into a quart of cold milk seizes into specks that never disperse and freeze as gritty flecks. Chop it fine, let it melt fully in the scalding milk over the double boiler, and whisk hard — or strain the base before chilling.
- Milk only, no creamThere is no cream and no egg in the base, so this freezes hard and slightly icy, closer to a chocolate sherbet than to ice cream. The whipped cream on top is doing real work, not just decoration.
- Chill properly"Chill" means cold all the way through — refrigerate the base at least four hours, preferably overnight. A warm base churns slowly and throws large ice crystals, which this low-fat mixture is already prone to.
- Ice and saltThree parts crushed ice to one part rock salt is the standard bucket-freezer ratio and still correct if you use an old crank machine. In a modern compressor or frozen-bowl machine, ignore it entirely and churn 20 to 30 minutes.
- VanillaA tablespoon reads as a lot by modern habit, but the chocolate here is unsweetened and assertive. Two teaspoons is a safe reduction if your extract is strong.
- Coupe glassesShallow stemmed dessert glasses, not the modern flat coupe cocktail glass. Any small stemmed glass or footed dish serves. Chill them first, since this melts quickly.
- YieldAbout a quart and a bit of base, which churns up to serve six in small glasses. Eat it the day it is made; without egg or cream it turns solid and crystalline after a night in the freezer.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, and its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook \ 1 was the plain unsweetened cake, the standard American baking chocolate of the period, and the pamphlets existed to teach home cooks enough uses for it to keep a supply in the cupboard. Frozen chocolate belongs to a moment when ice cream was passing from an occasional luxury to something a household could make on a summer afternoon: cheap manufactured ice and the crank freezer with its salt-packed bucket had put churned desserts within reach of ordinary kitchens. That this version uses milk rather than cream, and no eggs at all, marks it as the economical end of that range he chchocolate rather than the dairy.