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Frozen Desserts: Melt
Melt the chocolate, scald the milk with the sugar and salt, and pour it FROZEN DESSERTS over the chocolate. Add the cream, cool, freeze, and serve in glasses with a spoonful whipped cream in each.
Chocolate Sauce to Serve with Vanilla Ice Cream. 1¼ cupfuls water, cupful sugar, 6 tablespoonfuls Runkel's Chocolate, ½ tablespoonful cornstarch, cupful cold water, Dash salt, tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Boil the water and sugar five minutes. Dissolve the cornstarch in cold water, add the grated chocolate, combine the mixtures, and cook in a double boiler till creamy. Flavor with vanilla, and serve hot with vanilla cream frozen very hard. Frozen Plum Pudding. 1 quart chocolate ice cream, cupful candied fruit, cupful blanched and chopped almonds, cupful raisins, cupful macaroon toasted, + cupful shredded figs, crumbs cupful chopped walnuts.
Make the cream as directed in recipe for chocolate ice cream; when almost frozen, take off the lid, put in the fruit, turn the crank five minutes, then pack. This cream is so rich that it is at its best when served in small portions with a garnish of whipped cream.
Chocolate Mousse. 2 squares Runkel's Chocolate, 1½ cupfuls sugar, 1 cupful cream, tablespoonful granulated gelatin, 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 quart cream.
Melt the chocolate with cupful sugar and add 1 cupful cream. Scald, then put in the gelatin dissolved in cold water, the rest of the sugar, vanilla, and a dash of salt. Strain into a bowl and set in a pan of ice water.
Stir occasionally till it thickens, then add the whip from the rest of the cream. Pour into a mold, rubbing inside the lid of the mold with lard to form a waterproof coating so no brine can enter, pack in ice and salt, and let stand four hours.
Continental Pudding. 1½ pints baked Indian-meal pud ding, 1 pint thick cream, 1 cupful sugar, 1 tablespoonful caramel, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon.
A run of chocolate freezer recipes from a chocolate manufacturer's promotional pages, written for a hand-crank churn packed in ice and salt. Several of the quantities have lost their fractions, so treat the ingredient lists as guides rather than gospel.
- Missing fractionsMany quantities read simply "cupful" where the original almost certainly specified a half or a quarter. In the chocolate sauce, 1 cup sugar to 1½ cups water and ¼ cup cold water for slaking the cornstarch give a workable result; in the frozen plum pudding, read each fruit quantity as roughly ¼ cup against a quart of ice cream.
- The chocolateRunkel's was a brand of baking chocolate; the sugar in these recipes implies the unsweetened kind, and period baking squares generally ran about an ounce. Substitute 100% cacao baking chocolate, ounce for ounce; do not use chips or couverture, which carry their own sugar and cocoa butter and will throw the sweetness off.
- Mexican vanillaMcIlhenny's was a branded extract of the period. Any good vanilla extract works. Genuine Mexican vanilla is worth seeking out, but avoid cheap tourist-market bottles, some of which have historically been cut with coumarin-bearing tonka.
- Freezing without a churn"Turn the crank five minutes, then pack" assumes a salt-and-ice bucket freezer. A domestic ice cream machine handles all of these; without one, still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and beat thoroughly every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- The mousse needs no churningThe chocolate mousse is a gelatin-set frozen cream, folded rather than stirred. Chill the base over ice until it thickens to the consistency of raw egg white before folding in the whipped cream, or the whip will collapse and the mixture will separate into a dense layer and a foam.
- Sealing the moldGreasing the lid rim with lard kept the salt brine out of a mold buried in an ice cave. In a modern freezer this is unnecessary: use a covered loaf pan or a lidded metal mold, press plastic wrap to the surface, and give it four hours as directed, or overnight for a clean unmolding.
- Cornstarch sauceSlake the cornstarch in cold water before it meets anything hot, and cook the finished sauce over simmering water until it thickens and loses its raw starch taste, roughly 8 to 10 minutes. It sets firmer as it cools, so keep it slightly looser than you want at the table.
- Indian mealIn the Continental Pudding, Indian meal is cornmeal; the base is a baked cornmeal pudding of the hasty-pudding family, broken up and frozen with cream. The tablespoon of caramel means burnt-sugar syrup used as coloring and flavor, not soft caramel candy.
- PortionsA quart of the plum pudding mixture serves eight to ten in the small portions the text recommends; the mousse is built on five cups of cream in all, and once the larger quantity is whipped the finished mixture will more than fill a 2-quart mold, so choose the mold to suit the volume you actually have.
These pages come from a manufacturer's recipe insert of the kind that circulated heavily in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when Runkel Brothers of New York and a handful of rival chocolate houses printed cooking leaflets that named their own product in every ingredient list. Frozen plum pudding is the giveaway detail of the era: the boiled Christmas pudding of English tradition was reimagined in America as an iced dessert studded with the same candied fruit, figs, raisins and nuts, and it appears in hotel and household books alike from roughly the 1880s onward. The frozen mousse, set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream rather than churned, belonged to the age of the packed mold, when a dessert was buried for hours in a barrel of cracked ice and rock salt and the cook's real worry was brine seeping past the lid; the smear of lard on the rim is a small piece of vanished technique.