Home › Frozen Desserts › Frozen Desserts: McIlhenny
Frozen Desserts: McIlhenny
Frozen Chocolate Custard. 4 eggs, 1 pint cream, 1 pint milk, 1 cupful sugar, 2 ounces Runkel's Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Put the milk over the fire in a double boiler; add the chocolate grated. Beat the eggs and sugar until light, add to the hot milk, cook one minute, take from the fire, add the cream and a teaspoonful vanilla. When cold, freeze.
Stuffed Mousse. 1 quart strawberry water ice, 1 pint cream, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, cupful powdered sugar.
Whip the cream to a stiff froth, drain, sprinkle over it the sugar and vanilla, mix carefully. Pack a 2quart melon mold in salt and ice, line with the strawberry water ice, reserving enough to cover bottom of the mold. Turn the whipped cream into the center, cover the water ice over the bottom, put on the lid, bind with a strip of buttered muslin, cover with salt and ice, and stand three or four hours.
Two recipes from an era of hand-cranked freezers and rock salt, both written for cooks who already knew how to pack a mold. The branded ingredients are simply commercial products of the day and can be swapped without loss.
- The branded ingredientsRunkel's was a New York chocolate house; the two ounces called for were most likely unsweetened baking chocolate, given the separate cupful of sugar, so use two ounces of a good 100% cacao bar, chopped rather than grated if it is easier. McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla was a commercial extract; any pure vanilla extract stands in at the same measure.
- Cook the custard further than one minuteA minute over a double boiler will not reliably bring the eggs above 170F, and an undercooked base also churns thin and icy. Hold it at 170-175F, stirring, until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill before freezing.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to add beaten eggs and sugar straight to hot milk invites scrambling. Whisk a ladle of the hot chocolate milk into the eggs first, then return the lot to the pan.
- "When cold, freeze"This means fully chilled, not merely off the heat. Refrigerate the base several hours or overnight; a warm base overruns badly in any machine. In an ice cream maker the custard yields roughly a quart and a half, eight servings.
- Ice and salt proportionsFor the mousse mold, pack coarse rock salt and cracked ice at about one part salt to four or five parts ice, filling around the mold to above its lid line. Top up as the mixture drains; three to four hours is realistic only if the packing is maintained.
- The melon mold and the muslinA two-quart hinged melon or bombe mold is the traditional vessel; any tight-lidded metal mold of that capacity works. The buttered muslin strip bound round the seam keeps brine out, and there is no substitute for it beyond a careful wrapping of plastic film under the lid.
- Drain the whipped creamWhipping, then draining in a fine sieve or cheesecloth, removes the loose liquid that would otherwise freeze into ice crystals in the center of the bombe. It is the step that decides whether the filling is light or granular.
- A freezer will doLacking salt and ice, line the chilled mold with softened strawberry water ice, freeze firm, fill with the sweetened cream, seal and freeze at least four hours. Unmold by dipping the outside briefly in warm water.
Both of these are advertisements as much as recipes. Household compendiums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently printed formulas supplied by manufacturers, naming Runkel's chocolate and McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla where a plain cookbook would have said chocolate and vanilla; the recipes were genuine, and the brand names were arguably the price of inclusion. The Stuffed Mousse is a bombe in all but name, the French style of lining a mold with one frozen mixture and filling the hollow with another, and the freezing method described here is a still-freezing one: a salt-and-ice pack that draws heat out of a sealed mold over several hours, with no churning at all. That is why the filling is whipped cream rather than a custard, since air had to be beaten in before freezing rather than during it.