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Caramel Ice Cream
1 pint milk, 1 cupful granulated sugar, 1/2 cupful flour (small), 2 eggs, 1 quart cream, or 1 pint cream and 1 pint milk, 1 cupful brown sugar burned in spider to a golden brown. Boil milk in double boiler, mix sugar, flour, and eggs together, add to the boiling milk. Return to stove and cook mixture twenty minutes, stirring frequently. Add browned sugar to above mixture, set away to cool, and just before freezing add the cream.
A flour-thickened custard base flavored with dry caramel, written for a hand-crank freezer. The technique is sound; only the vessels and the vocabulary need translating.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally a footed one set over coals. Use a heavy skillet, and cast iron if you have it, since the sugar needs steady even heat to color without scorching.
- The caramel is the hingeThe cupful of brown sugar is melted dry and taken to a deep golden brown, not dissolved in water. Pull it from the heat the moment it smells nutty and dark; sugar goes from golden to bitter in seconds, and burnt caramel cannot be rescued once it is stirred into the custard.
- Adding hot caramel to custardThe molten sugar will seize and spit when it meets the milk mixture. Add it in a thin stream off the heat, stirring hard, and keep stirring until no hard lumps remain at the bottom of the pan.
- \"Small" half cup of flour: read this as a scant 1/2 cup, roughly 2 oz. It gives a thick, almost pudding-like base, which is what keeps this style of ice cream smooth without a machine that churns fast.
- Twenty minutes is not a misprintFlour-thickened custards genuinely need that long over water to lose their raw-starch taste, and the starch protects the eggs from curdling. Stir frequently and scrape the corners of the boiler.
- Cooling and freezingChill the base thoroughly, several hours or overnight, before adding the cream. A warm base freezes coarse. In a modern machine, churn 20-30 minutes, then harden in the freezer for at least two hours.
- Cream choiceThe quart of cream makes a rich ice cream; the pint cream plus pint milk version is leaner and freezes harder. Period cream varied considerably in richness, so modern heavy cream is only an approximate match.
- YieldThe base alone runs to about 3 pints, so expect roughly 2 quarts once churned; servings depend on portion size.