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Maple Ice Cream
One quart of rich cream, one coffeecup of maple syrup, one-fourth pound of shelled pecans. Chop nuts, add to cream and syrup, and freeze. -Mrs E. Curtis Rumrill.
Four ingredients and one sentence of method, which assumes you own a crank freezer and know what to do with it. The points below fill in what the original takes for granted.
- A coffeecupIn American cookbooks of this period a coffeecup is generally taken as roughly a cup, though the term was never standardized. Use about 1 cup of maple syrup for a quart of cream; that is 8 fluid ounces of syrup to 32 of cream, which is on the restrained side by modern standards.
- Rich creamThis means heavy cream, 36% fat or better, unhomogenized if you can get it. Modern ultra-pasteurized heavy cream works but whips air in less readily and tastes faintly cooked; standard pasteurized cream gives a cleaner maple flavor.
- Chill everything firstThe one thing that decides the texture. Cream, syrup and canister should all be refrigerator-cold before churning, or the mix spends its time cooling instead of freezing and the crystals come out coarse.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, about one part salt to three of ice by volume. An electric machine handles the same quart with no change to the recipe; a still-frozen pan version needs beating every 30 minutes to break up crystals.
- Add the pecans lateNuts stirred in at the start soften in the mix. Chop them, toast them lightly if you like, and fold them in during the last minute or two of freezing.
- Syrup grade mattersGrade A dark (formerly Grade B) carries far more maple flavor through cream and cold than the pale early-season syrup. Do not substitute pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavoring and will taste thin.
- RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft-serve. Pack it into a chilled container, cover, and hold it in the freezer an hour or two to firm before serving.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts once churned, or eight to ten servings. No eggs means it will freeze harder than a custard ice cream, so let it sit out five minutes before scooping.
Maple ice cream belongs to the northeastern kitchen, where maple syrup was a local sweetener and cream came off the top of the milk rather than out of a carton. The absence of eggs marks it as what was then called a Philadelphia ice cream, meaning cream frozen plain with a flavoring, as opposed to a French or custard ice cream cooked with yolks. Philadelphia-style recipes were prized for tasting purely of the cream and whatever went into it, and a good maple syrup is exactly the sort of flavor that a custard base would muddy.