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Cocoanut Ice Cream
One pound grated cocoanut, one pound sugar, one pint cream. Stir the grated nut gradually into the cream. Boil gently, or merely heat it, so as to thoroughly get the flavor of the nut. Then pour the cream into a bowl and stir in the sugar. When cold, stir in three pints fresh cream, then freeze. Cocoanut Ice Cream.
One cocoanut, pared and grated. Mix with a quart of cream, sweeten, and freeze.--Mrs. E. I.
Cocoanut Ice Cream.
One grated nut, three and a half quarts of milk, one pint of cream, two tablespoonfuls arrow-root mixed in a little cold milk. Sweeten to the taste, and freeze.--Mrs. D. R.
Three versions of the same idea, none of them giving times or yields. The first is the most carefully built; the third is a milk-heavy version stiffened with arrowroot. All assume a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and salt.
- The hinge: infuse, don't boilThe point of heating the coconut in cream is extraction of flavour, not cooking. Bring it barely to a simmer, hold it off the heat covered for 20-30 minutes, then chill. Hard boiling scorches the cream and tightens the coconut fibre so it gives up less.
- What a pound of grated coconut isRoughly 4 to 5 cups of freshly grated meat, which is about two medium coconuts. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works for the infusion at around 3 to 3½ cups by volume, though it is drier and gives a thinner flavour.
- A pound of sugarAbout 2¼ cups granulated. That is very sweet by modern taste against the 4 pints of dairy in the first recipe; 1 to 1¼ cups is closer to current practice, and the mixture should taste slightly too sweet warm because freezing mutes sweetness.
- Strain or don'tThe recipe gives no instruction to strain, so the grated nut presumably stayed in, giving a fibrous, chewy ice cream. Straining the infused cream and returning only a portion of the grated nut gives a smoother result without losing the flavour.
- The third version's arrowrootTwo tablespoons of arrowroot in 3½ quarts of milk is a very light thickening; it is there to keep a mostly-milk base from turning icy. Arrowroot must be whisked into cold milk first, then cooked just until it thickens and loses its cloudiness. It thins if boiled hard or held at a simmer.
- ScaleThe first recipe yields something over 4 pints of base, the third about a gallon. Modern countertop machines take 1 to 1½ quarts of base at a time; divide accordingly.
- Chill completely before freezing"When cold" means thoroughly cold. Refrigerate the base overnight at 40F or below before churning; a warm base churns to a coarse, buttery texture.
- FreezingAn ice-and-salt bucket freezer wants about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume. In any machine, churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then harden in the freezer for several hours.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a community book: the initialled contributors ("Mrs. E. I.", "Mrs. D. R.") were real women whose versions were printed side by side rather than reconciled into one, which is why three coconut ice creams sit in a row with no editorial comment on which is best. Coconuts reached Virginia and Maryland tables through the Caribbean trade, and by the 1870s a whole nut was common enough in Atlantic port cities to be an ordinary, if festive, purchase; grated coconut turns up throughout Southern cookbooks of the period in cakes, custards and puddings. Ice cream itself had moved from a confectioner's luxury into the household kitchen over the preceding decades, largely on the back of the hand-cranked pail freezer with its ice-and-salt jacket, a pattern generally traced to the 1840s and mass-produced in the years after the Civil War. The casualness of these instructions -- "sweeten to the taste, and freeze" -- assumes a cook who already knew the machine and needed only the proportions.