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Frozen Desserts: Scald
Scald the cream with half the sugar, stir until sugar is dissolved, and cool. Grate the pineapple, mix with the rest of the sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add the remaining pint cream to sweetened cream, and freeze; add the lemon juice to the pineapple, and stir into the frozen cream; beat thoroughly and pack. If canned pineapple is used, add the lemon juice, and stir into the cream when cold.
Ginger Cream. 6 ounces preserved ginger, tablespoonfuls lemon juice, 1 pint cream, cupful sugar.
Pound the sugar to a paste with the lemon juice. Mix sugar and cream, add to the ginger, press through a sieve, and freeze Cocoanut Cream. 1 quart cream, 1 cupful sugar, 1 tablespoonful Mellbennys Mexican Vanilla, I cocoanut grated.
Scald half the cream with the sugar. When cool, add the rest of cream, vanilla, and cocoanut; freeze.
Vanilla Cream with Extract. 1 quart cream, 1 cupful sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls Mclinenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Scald half the cream with sugar.
When cold, add the remainder of the cream, vanilla, and freeze.
FROZEN DESSERTS Ice Cream from Condensed Milk. 1 can condensed milk, 3 tablespoonfuls cornstarch, tablespoonful Mellbenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Add sufficient boiling water to can condensed milk to make it the proper consistency. Moisten 3 tablespoonfuls cornstarch with a little cold milk, add to the mixture, stir and cook five minutes, and take from the fire; when cold, add vanilla extract to flavor; freeze.
A run of ice-cream formulas from the era of the hand-crank freezer, written for cooks who already knew how to pack a churn. The text as printed has lost the ingredient list for the opening pineapple cream and garbles the vanilla brand name, so read the quantities with care.
- Missing and garbled amountsThe pineapple recipe's ingredient list has dropped out of the page entirely — it calls for "the remaining pint cream," so at least two pints were intended, but the pineapple, sugar and lemon quantities are simply gone. Ginger Cream likewise reads "tablespoonfuls lemon juice" and "cupful sugar" with the numbers lost. Do not guess at these; work from a complete recipe.
- Cream means heavy creamIn household books of this period "cream" in a frozen dessert generally meant a rich cream, closest to modern heavy or whipping cream; butterfat varied and was not standardised, so treat any exact percentage as an approximation. Half-and-half or light cream will churn to something icy rather than smooth.
- ScaldingBring the cream to about 180F — steam and a ring of small bubbles at the edge, no rolling boil. Its purpose here is dissolving the sugar completely, since undissolved sugar makes for a grainy set.
- Chill fully before churning"When cool" and "when cold" should mean refrigerator-cold, ideally an overnight rest. Warm mix churns slowly, whips in less air and freezes coarse.
- Fresh pineapple and dairyRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down milk proteins and can turn a cream base thin and unpleasantly bitter. That may be why the fruit is folded into cream that is already frozen, and why the canned variant — heat-treated, so the enzyme is dead — can be stirred in when cold. Heating fresh pineapple pulp deactivates it too, though the recipe does not ask for that.
- Preserved gingerSix ounces by weight of stem ginger in heavy syrup, the kind that came in Canton jars. Drained crystallised ginger is the nearest supermarket equivalent; reduce the sugar to account for the coating.
- The vanillaThe name appears as "Mellbennys" and "Mclinenny's Mexican Vanilla"; it is a brand name mangled in the typesetting, and which firm is meant cannot be established from this text. Use any pure vanilla extract. Two tablespoons per quart is generous by modern habit but not wrong for a cream base, where cold dulls flavour.
- Freezing and packingThese assume a bucket freezer turned in a mix of crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts to one. "Pack" means transferring the churned cream to a mould or can, sealing it, and burying it in fresh ice and salt for two or three hours to ripen and firm — the equivalent of a stint in a modern freezer.
- Condensed milk versionA can of sweetened condensed milk; a modern 14-ounce can is the nearest equivalent, though period can sizes varied. Thin with boiling water to about the consistency of ordinary milk. Cook the cornstarch slurry the full five minutes at a bare simmer or the starch will taste raw and chalky. This is the cheap version, and it freezes harder and eats less smoothly than the cream bases above.
- YieldA quart of cream plus sugar and flavouring makes roughly six cups of finished ice cream, or eight to ten small servings of the sort a period table expected.
Ice cream became a middle-class rather than a rich household's dish in the second half of the nineteenth century, once commercially harvested lake ice was cheap in cities and the crank freezer with its rotating dasher was a fixture in the summer kitchen. The recipes here map that moment neatly: real cream and a whole grated coconut at one end, a can of sweetened condensed milk stretched with water and thickened with cornstarch at the other. The preserved ginger came in stoneware jars from China through the same import trade that brought tea, and Mexican vanilla was aggressively branded in American household books of the period. Pineapple appears in the list too, and the recipe bothers to give separate directions for the tinned kind.