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Frozen Desserts: Vanilla
1/4 cupful sugar, Montrose Pudding. 1 quart cream, Yolks 6 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 pint strawberry water ice.
Scald the cream, beat the yolks and sugar, stir into the boiling cream, and cook until it thickens. Take from the fire, add the remaining pint cream and the vanilla, stand until cool, and freeze. When frozen, pack into a round mold, leaving a well in the center. Fill with strawberry water ice, cover with some of the pudding you have taken out. Pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. Serve with the following sauce poured around it:
Vanilla Sauce. 1 tablespoonful gelatin, 1 pint cream, Yolks 3 eggs, + cupful sugar, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Cover the gelatin with a little cold water and soak half an hour. Scald the cream. Beat the yolks and sugar together, add the boiling cream, stir until it thickens, add the gelatin, stir until it dissolves; take from the fire, add the vanilla, and stand in a cold place until wanted.
Frozen Chocolate with Whipped Cream. 2 squares Runkel's Chocolate, 1 cupful sugar, Dash salt, 1 cupful milk, 3 cupfuls thin cream, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Three items run together here: a bombe-style molded ice cream, a pouring custard sauce, and the beginning of a frozen chocolate whose method has been lost off the end of the page. The first two are complete and workable; the third is only an ingredient list.
- The cream arithmeticThe list says 1 quart cream, and the method scalds "the cream" then adds "the remaining pint." Scald one pint, build the custard in it, then stir the second pint in cold off the heat. Splitting it this way cools the custard fast and stops the yolks tightening.
- The broken fractionThe sauce calls for "+ cupful sugar." That is a fraction that did not survive typesetting; from the proportions of similar boiled custards in this period it is almost certainly a half cup, but the original is genuinely ambiguous.
- Custard doneness"Cook until it thickens" means to about 175-180F, when it coats a spoon and holds a drawn line. Past 185F the yolks curdle. A double boiler is safer than direct heat with this quantity of egg.
- The brand namesMcIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla and Runkel's Chocolate are trade names embedded in the ingredient lists. Use any good vanilla extract; Runkel's sold baking chocolate in squares, and if these are the usual unsweetened one-ounce squares, two squares is two ounces.
- Freezing and packingAn ice-cream maker replaces the hand crank. For the salt-and-ice pack that follows, use coarse rock salt and crushed ice at roughly one part salt to three or four parts ice, packed around the sealed mold. A deep freezer at 0F does the same job with less mess.
- The two-hour standThis is ripening, not further freezing. It firms the bombe so the strawberry core cuts as a clean disc rather than smearing. Do not skip it, and seal the mold well if you use a salt pack so brine cannot seep in.
- Gelatin in the sauceA tablespoon of granulated gelatin is more than a modern quarter-ounce envelope. It sets the sauce to a soft, barely-flowing custard that pools around the mold; if you want a sauce that pours freely, use less.
- The strawberry water iceTreated as assumed knowledge here rather than given: a strained sweetened strawberry puree frozen without dairy. A pint of good sorbet substitutes directly.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A quart of cream plus a pint of water ice, frozen with some overrun, should come to something over two quarts, enough for eight to ten. The sauce makes roughly a pint.
Montrose pudding belongs to the late-nineteenth-century family of bombes: an ice cream frozen in a lined mold with a contrasting center, cut at the table so the section shows two colors. The form is generally traced to French confectioners, and English and American cooks gave the variations aristocratic and place names as a matter of course, Nesselrode being the best known. What dates this page more precisely than the dish is the branding. Household books of this era were often part-financed by manufacturers, and recipes were written with the trade name inside the ingredient list. McIlhenny and Runkel Brothers both traded in this period, and their appearance here says less about the cooking than about how the book was paid for.