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Norvell House Caramel Ice Cream
One gallon rich, sweet cream, four teacups powdered sugar, five tablespoonfuls caramel. Mix well and freeze hard.
Three ingredients and no custard base, which makes this a Philadelphia-style ice cream: uncooked, unthickened, and entirely dependent on the quality of the cream. Two things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- "Caramel" means burnt sugarIn nineteenth-century American cookbooks caramel is sugar cooked dark, sometimes to the point of bitterness, then let down with a little boiling water into a thin dark syrup kept in a bottle for coloring and flavoring. It is not the milk-and-butter caramel sauce sold today. Five tablespoons of a modern caramel sauce would give you a faintly sweet, pale ice cream instead of the deep scorched flavor intended.
- The teacupA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, so four teacups is roughly three cups of powdered sugar.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century "powdered" sugar is granulated sugar crushed fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in the box today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match, and it dissolves in cold cream without graininess.
- Don't use all heavy creamA gallon of straight heavy cream churned in a modern machine can separate and go to butter. Cut it with milk. A mix of cream and milk gives about the butterfat of good old-fashioned "rich, sweet cream" and freezes smooth.
- Scale it downA gallon of cream yields somewhere near a gallon and a half of finished ice cream once air is churned in — thirty servings or more. Quarter the recipe for a 1.5-quart machine: 1 quart cream and milk, 3/4 cup superfine sugar, about 4 teaspoons burnt-sugar syrup.
- Chill before churning"Mix well and freeze hard" assumed cream straight from a cold dairy and a bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which took the better part of an hour. Chill the mixture to refrigerator temperature or below before it goes into the machine; warm base churns slowly and comes out coarse.
- Hardening"Freeze hard" most likely points to the second stage, when the packed freezer was buried in fresh ice and salt to set. The modern equivalent is two to four hours in a covered container in the freezer after churning; served straight from the machine it will be soft.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from named Virginia households, hotels and boarding houses, and the credit line here is doing the work of a recommendation — a reader was meant to recognize the establishment and trust the recipe. Ice cream of this kind, with no eggs and no cooking, is what is now called Philadelphia-style, and it belonged to households with access to both good cream and a great deal of ice; the domestic crank freezer, patented in the 1840s and cheap by the 1870s, is what put a gallon-scale recipe like this within reach of a private kitchen at all. The burnt-sugar caramel it depends on was a staple of the period pantry, kept bottled and used as much for coloring gravies and cakes as for flavor.