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Ice Cream and Ices
For a plain foundation ice cream use equal quantity of new milk and cream. Heat to boiling point (not beyond) adding one cup of sugar with a pinch of salt. Let cool before adding fruit juice or pulp, or both, with perhaps a little lemon juice to bring out the flavour. It is often advisable, where the fruit juice is uncooked or very tart, to partially freeze the cooled cream and milk before adding the juice.
About one heaping teaspoon of gelatine (dissolved before adding) for each pint of the milk and cream gives the smoothness of a mousse, which is also attained by the addition of whipped cream.
Evaporated cream or condensed milk may be used with excellent results.
Whipped cream and the whipped whites of eggs in equal portion may be frozen and merely flavoured with fruit juice or have added an equal part of sweetened fruit pulp.
This is a formula rather than a fixed recipe: a base of scalded milk and cream that takes whatever fruit is in season. The proportions are left to the cook, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The quantities are genuinely open"Equal quantity of new milk and cream" gives no volume, and the cup of sugar is not tied to one. A workable reading is one pint milk to one pint cream with the cup of sugar, which lands near the sweetness of a modern custard-free ice cream; taste the cooled base and adjust before freezing.
- Acid and dairy: the hingeThe instruction to cool the base fully, and to partially freeze it when the juice is raw or very tart, is the point of the method. Citrus, currant, raspberry or rhubarb juice stirred into warm milk can curdle it; stirred into a half-frozen base it is far less likely to break.
- "Heat to boiling point (not beyond)"The text says take it just to the boil and no further. Many modern cooks stop a little short, at a scald, when the surface shivers and a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. Prolonged boiling risks catching on the pan and throws a skin you then have to strain out.
- New milk"New" simply means fresh, unsoured milk of the day. Whole milk is the equivalent; skimmed or low-fat milk will freeze harder and coarser, since fat is what keeps the ice crystals small.
- GelatineA heaping teaspoon per pint of dairy is close to one modern envelope (about 2 1/4 tsp) for a full quart of base. Soften it in a few tablespoons of cold milk for five minutes, then stir into the hot base until clear; undissolved granules set into rubbery threads that no amount of churning will break up.
- Evaporated versus condensedPeriod usage of these terms was loose, and the two are not interchangeable now. Evaporated milk is unsweetened; sweetened condensed milk is heavily sugared (on the order of 40-45 per cent sugar by weight), so cut the cup of sugar sharply or the mixture will barely freeze.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern churn, chill the base thoroughly overnight first, then spin 20-30 minutes and ripen it in the freezer for a few hours. Without a machine, the whipped-cream-and-egg-white variant at the end is the one to make, as it is a still-frozen mousse and needs no churning.
- The raw egg white variantThe final sentence freezes whipped whites that are never heated. Freezing does not kill salmonella; use pasteurized whites if you make that version, or pick the gelatine route for the same smoothness.
- YieldOn the one-pint-to-one-pint reading assumed above, a quart of base plus fruit should give something over a quart once churned, depending on how much air the machine works in.
Cookbooks of this period often opened their ice cream chapters with a "foundation" or "Philadelphia" cream of exactly this kind: dairy, sugar and flavouring, with no egg custard, which was regarded as the French style. The gelatine and whipped-cream tricks here are a domestic answer to a real problem, since a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and salt struggles to beat air into a mixture, and a plain cream base left to itself sets grainy. The writer offers evaporated cream and condensed milk as equals: canned milks had become cheap and reliable household staples by the turn of the twentieth century and were widely promoted for frozen desserts.