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Vanilla Ice Cream
Flavor one quart of cream with vanilla, and sugar to taste, remembering that a mixture to be frozen must be a little sweeter than if it were not to be frozen. Put in a freezer and freeze. To vary this ice cream, powdered macaroons, candied cherries or chopped nuts may be added. It may be served with various sauces.
This is Philadelphia-style ice cream: cream, sugar, vanilla, no eggs and no cooking. The recipe gives no sugar quantity, so the proportions are the thing to settle before you start.
- Sugar, since none is specifiedFor one quart of cream, 3/4 to 1 cup of granulated sugar lands in the normal range for this style. Sugar is not only flavor here — it depresses the freezing point and keeps the texture from turning to a solid block, so cutting it far below 3/4 cup gives you something icy and hard.
- Which cream"Cream" in an older American book of this type likely means something in the region of 18-20% fat, close to modern light cream or half-and-half. A quart of today's heavy cream (36%) churns very quickly and can turn buttery; a mix of 2 cups heavy cream to 2 cups whole milk is closer to the original.
- Dissolve the sugar coldWith no custard base, undissolved sugar will grit. Whisk the sugar into a little of the cream until it is completely gone before adding the rest, then chill the whole mixture to refrigerator temperature — around 40F — before it goes near the machine.
- VanillaAbout 1 tablespoon of extract per quart, or one split bean steeped in the warmed cream and then chilled. If you steep a bean, strain before churning; the seeds can stay in.
- The ice-and-salt ratioEight parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, by volume, packed in layers around the can. Too much salt freezes the mix fast against the wall of the can and gives coarse crystals; too little never brings the brine cold enough. Drain the meltwater off through the hole in the pail as you go and top up with more ice and salt.
- A modern machineAny canister or compressor machine handles this directly: churn 20-30 minutes, until it holds a soft-serve consistency. It will be softer than commercial ice cream because there are no eggs, gums or stabilizers to hold it.
- The additions go in lastPowdered macaroons, candied cherries and chopped nuts should be folded in when churning is nearly finished, not at the start. Added early, they get pulverized by the dasher and the macaroon crumbs dissolve into the base.
- Ripening and yieldA quart of cream gives roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts churned, serving six to eight. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two to firm; because it has no stabilizers, eat it within a day or two before it goes grainy.
Ice cream made with nothing but cream, sugar and flavoring is called Philadelphia-style, in contrast to the French or custard style built on egg yolks — a distinction American cookbooks were already drawing in the nineteenth century, and one that survived because the eggless version tastes cleaner and more directly of cream. The hand-cranked pail with an inner can and a dasher, the arrangement this book describes at the back, was the standard domestic freezer from the mid-1800s until electric refrigeration with a freezing compartment became common in American homes, and it may well be why so many older recipes give quantities in quarts of cream and say nothing at all about time or temperature: presumably the cook judged by the resistance of the crank. The instruction to sweeten a frozen mixture more heavily than an unfrozen one appears again and again in period books, and it is simple physiology — cold suppresses perception of sweetness, so a base tasted warm at the right sweetness will read as thin and flat once frozen. The list of variations at the end is characteristic of the genre too: one base recipe, then macaroons, cherries or nuts to turn it into several courses across several menus.