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Chocolate Ice-Cream
Two desserts-spoons of Larkin Gelatine One quart of milk Two eggs Two cups of sugar One pint of cream Two teaspoons of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Two squares of unsweetened chocolate Soften the Gelatine in one cup of the milk. Scald the remainder, with the Chocolate, and into it stir the beaten yolks and sugar. When thickened, add the softened Gelatine. Cool, and add the beaten whites, cream and Vanilla Flavoring Extract. Freeze. CARAMEL ICE-CREAM No. 2 With the foregoing formula, a pleasant flavor may be obtained by omitting the Chocolate and cooking the sugar to the caramel stage.
A gelatine-stabilised custard ice-cream from a manufacturer's booklet, where the brand names stand in for measurements a modern cook has to reconstruct. The finished mixture also carries a specific hazard, described first.
- The raw whites are the problemThe yolks are cooked into the custard, but the beaten whites go in after the base has cooled and are never heated at all — they are simply frozen. A frozen dessert holds raw egg indefinitely without killing anything, and uncooked egg white in ice-cream and mousse is a well-documented route for Salmonella. Use a current recipe built on a fully cooked custard or pasteurised egg.
- Dessert-spoonsA dessert-spoon is about two level teaspoons, so two of them is roughly four teaspoons of powdered gelatine — more than one modern envelope, and likely to give a firmer, slightly elastic body than a modern recipe would.
- Squares of chocolateA "square" of unsweetened chocolate is one ounce, sold in cakes scored into one-ounce squares. Two squares is 2 oz for a full quart of milk plus a pint of cream, which is a mild chocolate by present tastes.
- "Scald"Bring the milk to about 180F, when it steams and shows a ring of small bubbles at the edge — not to a rolling boil, which will scorch the chocolate solids on the pan bottom.
- "When thickened"The custard is done at 170–175F, when it coats a spoon and holds a line drawn through it. Past 180F the yolks curdle, and the gelatine will not rescue a broken base.
- "Freeze"This assumes a hand-cranked bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt — sources give anywhere from about three to eight parts ice to one of salt — cranked for twenty minutes or more. The instruction carries little meaning for a still-freezer: without agitation the mixture freezes much harder and coarser.
- Caramel variationThe recipe says only to cook the sugar to the caramel stage; the usual reading is to caramelise the two cups of sugar to a deep amber, around 340–350F, before it meets the hot milk, which will spit when the two are combined.
- YieldNothing is stated: the quart of milk and pint of cream, with the sugar and eggs, make roughly two quarts of base, and more once air is churned in.
The named ingredients tie this page to its purpose: it comes from a cookbook issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, the soap manufacturer that grew into a vast mail-order house selling flavouring extracts, gelatine, spices and furniture directly to housewives, often through neighbourhood buying clubs. Recipes like this one existed to move Larkin gelatine and Larkin vanilla, and the gelatine is likely doing real work: ice-cream churned in a salt-and-ice bucket had to survive being packed away before serving, and a gelatine-set custard holds its shape as it softens where a plain cream base would slump. The caramel note appended at the end is typical of the genre — one base formula, several flavours, so that a single package of the company's product could be presented as the foundation of a whole chapter of desserts.