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Winter Ice Cream
(For use at a temperature of 20° or below) Mix together a pint of cream, six crushed macaroons and a tablespoonful of sugar. Beat until stiff and pack in a small mold that has a cover.
Set the mold in a larger receptacle packed in snow, put in deep snow out of doors. Freeze for six hours. If frozen out of doors, you do not need salt for freezing. Any ice cream made with cream may be frozen in this way. Chopped and pounded peanut brittle may be substituted for the macaroons, or the cream may simply be sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
This is a still-frozen cream — a semifreddo in all but name — that relies on whipped cream for its texture rather than churning. A few notes on the vessel, the timing and the substitute for a snowbank.
- What the temperature meansThe heading "20° or below" is 20°F, roughly −7°C, and it refers to the outdoor air. Snow at that temperature will pull enough heat out of a metal mould to set the cream without any salt.
- A pint of creamTwo cups. Use heavy or whipping cream, at least 35 percent fat; anything lighter will not beat stiff and will freeze into a solid block of ice crystals.
- The hinge: beat it properly stiffNothing here is churned, so all the air the finished cream will ever have goes in at this stage. Note that the recipe mixes the cream, macaroons and sugar together and beats the lot until stiff, rather than folding crumbs into already-whipped cream; either way, take it to firm peaks and handle it gently so as not to knock out the volume that keeps it scoopable.
- MacaroonsIn a book of this period a macaroon is the almond-and-egg-white sort, crisp and dry, not the coconut haystack and not a French macaron. Six of them crushed gives roughly half a cup of crumbs. Amaretti are the closest thing on a shelf today.
- The mouldA covered mould, buried inside a larger container packed with snow. The cover matters — it keeps meltwater and grit out, and lets you invert the thing cleanly. A loaf tin with foil pressed to the surface works the same way.
- Six hours, and the indoor equivalentSix hours is what the recipe allows for snow at around 20°F. A home freezer runs nearer 0°F and will set the same quantity firm somewhat sooner — check it after several hours, or leave it overnight and let it stand ten minutes before unmoulding.
- Peanut brittle variantPound it finer than you think necessary. Large shards go glassy and hard at freezer temperature and are unpleasant to bite; a coarse powder dissolves into the cream as it melts on the tongue.
- YieldA pint of cream beaten stiff makes about a quart of frozen mixture — six small servings. It is very rich and does not want a large portion.
Freezing by snow alone is older than the ice-cream freezer. What is odd is the placement. Cook and Be Cool is a hot-weather book, organised around keeping a kitchen bearable in August, and it closes its dessert chapter with a dish that cannot be made until January. The recipe also marks a technique shift worth noticing — because nothing is stirred during freezing, the smoothness has to come from whipped cream rather than from churning, which makes this a still-frozen cream of the kind Italian cooks call semifreddo.