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Frozen Chocolate
Put in double boiler 1 pint milk and 1 1/4 squares chocolate. When milk is scalded and chocolate melted pour gradually onto 3/4 3/4 cup sugar, mixed with 1 egg yolk and Few grains salt. Return to double boiler and cook and stir for 1 minute. Chill, and just before freezing add 1/2 cup cream, beaten stiff, and 1/2 tablespoon vanilla. Freeze, using three parts ice to one part salt.
A small-batch chocolate custard ice cream from the era of the hand-cranked freezer. Everything about it translates directly except the freezing apparatus.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 1 1/4 squares is about 1 1/4 oz. The 3/4 cup sugar is doing all the sweetening; do not substitute semisweet without cutting it back.
- Cook the custard further than one minuteOne minute of stirring was the old shorthand for thickening. Cook and stir until the mixture reaches 170-175F and lightly coats the spoon, which both sets the yolk and eliminates any concern about it.
- Chill properly"Chill" means cold all the way through, ideally several hours or overnight at refrigerator temperature. A base that goes into the freezer lukewarm churns coarse and grainy.
- Whipped cream, folded lateThe 1/2 cup cream is beaten stiff and added at the last moment on purpose: it aerates a base that a slow crank freezer would otherwise turn dense. Fold it in gently rather than stirring it through.
- Vanilla measureHalf a tablespoon is 1 1/2 teaspoons, a generous but deliberate amount against the small quantity of chocolate.
- Ice and saltThree parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed around the canister, is the classic proportion for a churned ice cream. In a modern machine, ignore this line entirely and churn the chilled base 20-25 minutes.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and beat it smooth with a fork or hand mixer every 30-40 minutes until firm, three or four times. The folded whipped cream makes this still-frozen version workable.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half, which is four small servings of the sort this book intends, or three if you are not being delicate.
This comes from the run of small frozen desserts in Alice Bradley's For Luncheon and Supper Guests, a 1920s collection aimed at hostesses entertaining company. Bradley was principal of Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston and cooking editor of Woman's Home Companion, and the recipes carry the marks of that lineage: exact measurements, a custard base built in a double boiler, and portions scaled to a card party rather than a family dinner. The ice-and-salt instruction is the one line that dates it; three parts ice to one part salt was a commonly given proportion for ice cream in American cookbooks of the period, since a saltier mix freezes the cream hard against the canister wall before the dasher can work air into it. The small quantity of unsweetened chocolate here reflects a time when it was sold in half-pound cakes scored into ounce squares.