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Frozen Dainties
Frozen Tapioca Pudding Put 1⅓ cup minute tapioca into 3 cups boiling water. Cook 10 minutes, or until clear. Cut fine, 1 can pineapple (or fresh pineapple), 2 oranges, 2 bananas, or any other fruit you may have. Pour over juices of fruit, adding juice of 1 lemon, 1/2 cups sugar. Mix with tapioca, and when cool freeze in fireless, leaving in cooker about 3 hours.
Marshmallow Ice Cream Put 1 cupful of sugar and 1¼ of a cupful of water into a saucepan and let it boil without stirring until it will spin a thread when dropped from the spoon (230 degrees). Add 1/2 a pound of fresh marshmallows cut in halves and when partly melted beat until smooth, using an egg beater.
Pour, while beating constantly, on the stiffly whipped whites of 3 eggs and beat until cold. Add 1½ cupfuls of heavy cream whipped solid, 2 ounces of blanched chopped pistachio nuts pounded to a paste and a little green vegetable coloring matter. Freeze slowly and serve.
Frozen Fruit Salad Place 1 tablespoon butter in double boiler, add the well beaten yolks of 2 eggs and 3½ tablespoons flour. Mix well. Add 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, ⅓ teaspoon paprika, few grains cayenne. After mixing add 2/3 cup milk and 1/3 cup lemon juice.
Cook, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Add 1 cup chopped mixed fruit. Fold into the beaten mixture, put in pint brick mold, cover with buttered paper and tin cover.
Put in salt and ice 2 hours. Cut in slices, and serve over lettuce leaf.
Chocolate Surprise Melt 3 squares chocolate over hot water and scalded milk. Add 1/2 cup sugar to chocolate, and salt. Add gradually 1/4 cups boiling water, boil a moment, and add 3 cups scalded milk with another 1/2 cup sugar. Cool and freeze. Garnish with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
Strawberry Mousse To 1 pint of fresh crushed strawberries add 1 tablespoon of gelatine, dissolved in a little hot water, and 3/4 of a cup of sugar. When the berries and gelatine begin to thicken, fold in 1 pint of cream which has been whipped very stiff. Put in a mold and freeze 3 or 4 hours.
Vanilla Ice Cream Stir together 1¾ cups sugar, 1 level tablespoon flour. Then add 1/2 pints milk, yolks 2 eggs well beaten.
Boil, stir constantly. When cold add well beaten whites 2 eggs, mixed thoroughly with 1 pint double cream whipped. Flavor with 2 teaspoons vanilla, 1 of almond. Freeze.
Six frozen desserts from a fireless-cooker book, written for a household that froze by packing a metal can in ice and salt inside the insulated well rather than by cranking or plugging anything in. The transcription carries several garbled fractions, noted below.
- What "freeze in fireless" meansThe fireless cooker's insulated compartment was used in reverse: the mixture went into a lidded metal can, the can was packed around with crushed ice and coarse salt (a common proportion was about three parts ice to one of salt by volume), and the lid closed to hold the cold. Only the tapioca is explicitly sent to the fireless, but nothing on the page calls for cranking, so treat these as still-frozen desserts. A modern equivalent is a covered loaf pan or brick mold in the freezer; an ice cream machine will give a smoother result for the two custard-based ones.
- Still-freezing needs helpThe mousse and the tapioca pudding are built to survive without churning, since whipped cream and tapioca starch both interrupt ice crystals. The chocolate mixture, which is milk, sugar and water with nothing whipped into it, will freeze grainy if left alone for three hours; the vanilla, with its whipped cream and whites, fares better. Scrape and beat both thoroughly two or three times during the first two hours, or run them in a machine.
- Garbled measurementsIn the vanilla ice cream, read "13/4 cups sugar" as 1 3/4 cups and "1/2 pints milk" as 1 1/2 pints. In the Chocolate Surprise, "1/4 cups boiling water" is almost certainly 1 1/4 cups. The 1 teaspoon salt in the fruit salad dressing is high for the quantity of custard; 1/2 teaspoon is more in keeping with the paprika and cayenne.
- Raw egg whitesThe vanilla ice cream folds in unbeaten-by-heat whites after the custard has cooled, and the marshmallow version pours 230F syrup over whites, which does not reliably bring them to a safe temperature. Freezing does not kill salmonella. Use pasteurized whites, or omit them and rely on the whipped cream.
- Chocolate squaresA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so three squares is 3 oz with 1 cup of sugar total. Modern bittersweet bars are already sweetened and will make the mixture cloying at that sugar level.
- Marshmallows and the thread stageToday's bagged marshmallows will still melt into the syrup but take longer and need patience with the beater. The syrup temperature given, 230F, falls within the usual thread-stage range and is worth trusting over the spoon test.
- GelatineOne tablespoon of granulated gelatine is about a third more than one 1/4-oz envelope (which holds roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons). Soften it in cold water first, then dissolve in hot, and stir it into the berries while it is still warm and pourable or it will set in threads.
- Minute tapiocaThe quick-cooking granulated kind, still sold. Pearl tapioca will not clear in ten minutes and cannot be substituted directly.
- Yields and servingMost of these make roughly 1 to 1 1/2 quarts, or six to eight servings; the fruit salad is specified as a pint brick, which slices into four or five portions on lettuce. Let the still-frozen ones stand ten minutes before slicing.
Fireless cookstove manuals appeared in quantity in the United States between about 1905 and 1920, promoting an insulated box with soapstone or iron radiators as a way to cook without tending a fire through a summer kitchen. Because the same insulation that holds heat also holds cold, the cookers were sometimes said to double as freezers, and dessert chapters like this one may have helped sell them: the well took the place of a hand-cranked ice cream freezer for anyone willing to buy ice and rock salt. The recipes themselves are pure period American: marshmallow whip tinted green with pistachio, chocolate thinned with scalded milk, and above all the frozen fruit salad, a cooked-dressing brick served in slices on a lettuce leaf, which was a fixture of ladies' luncheons from the 1920s through the 1950s and now reads as the strangest thing on the page.