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Brown Bread Ice Cream
3 pints cream 1 1/4 cups dried brown bread crumbs 7/8 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt Soak crumbs in one quart cream, let stand fifteen minutes, rub through sieve, add sugar, salt, and remaining cream; then freeze.
A frozen custard-less cream, flavoured only by dried dark bread. The whole character of it rests on how the crumbs are treated, so start there.
- Dry the crumbs first"Dried" is not decorative: fresh crumbs go pasty in the cream. The recipe gives no method, so spread the crumbs out and dry them in a low oven until crisp, then cool completely before soaking.
- What brown bread means hereIn an American book of this period it is a dark loaf raised with molasses and often part rye or cornmeal, or else a graham/whole-wheat loaf. Either works; a modern seeded sandwich wheat bread does not, as the seeds read as grit.
- The cream, dividedThree pints is 6 cups. One quart (4 cups) goes onto the crumbs to soak, and the remaining 2 cups are added after sieving. Heavy cream throughout gives a very rich result; half heavy cream and half whole milk churns better and still freezes firm.
- Sugar and saltSeven-eighths cup of sugar is about 175 g. The quarter teaspoon of salt is a small amount but worth keeping in a plain cream base.
- Rubbing through the sievePressing the soaked crumbs through a sieve carries the flavour into the cream and holds back the coarsest fragments, so the base is comparatively smooth. If you want visible texture, reserve a spoonful of the dried crumbs and fold them in at the end of churning.
- "Then freeze"The original assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a domestic machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first (several hours, or overnight, which also deepens the bread flavour) and churn in two batches, since 6 cups of liquid will overflow a standard 1.5-quart canister.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts once churned, serving ten to twelve. It is firm and rich; small portions suit it, particularly alongside stewed fruit.
Brown bread ice cream belongs to a family of frozen creams flavoured with something dry and toasted rather than with fruit or chocolate, a group that also includes burnt-almond and macaroon creams. English cookery books of the nineteenth century give versions using browned brown breadcrumbs, and the idea appears in American domestic manuals, where "brown bread" carried its own local meaning of a molasses-sweetened, often steamed loaf. The technique suited a household that baked its own bread, where stale ends could be dried for crumbs and cream was the expensive part. Freezing was hard physical work with a hand crank, ice and coarse salt.