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Brown Bread Ice Cream
Add to French Ice Cream one cup brown bread crumbs dried. Freeze.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already have the book's French Ice Cream at hand — an egg-yolk custard base, churned. Everything worth knowing is in how and when the crumbs go in.
- The hinge: add the crumbs lateFold the dried crumbs in during the last minute or two of churning, or stir them through the soft-frozen cream before hardening. Crumbs stirred into the liquid base swell and dissolve, and the result tastes of wet bread rather than toast.
- What "French Ice Cream" meansIn period usage it is a cooked custard base — egg yolks, sugar, milk and cream, thickened over heat and cooled — as distinct from Philadelphia-style ice cream, which is uncooked cream and sugar. Any modern custard ice cream base will serve; check the book's own French Ice Cream for its quantity.
- "Brown bread"In a 1907 Boston book this may mean either a plain wholemeal or rye loaf, or steamed Boston brown bread of cornmeal, rye and molasses. The steamed kind is sweet and soft and gives a molasses-gingerbread character; a dense wholemeal or rye loaf gives the drier, nuttier English version. Both are defensible.
- "Dried" is doing real workCrumb the bread, spread it thin, and dry it in a 300F oven until crisp and lightly toasted, 15–20 minutes, stirring once. Tossing the crumbs with a spoonful or two of sugar first will caramelize them into brittle flecks that keep some crunch in the finished cream.
- Freezing"Freeze" in 1907 meant a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, then repacking to harden. A modern churn does the same job; the ice cream still wants two to three hours in the freezer to firm up.
- Quantity and yieldQuantity -- One cup of dried crumbs is generous against a typical custard base and gives a distinctly bready ice cream. Half a cup is closer to modern taste.
Brown bread ice cream is an English idea of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when toasted breadcrumbs — often browned with sugar — were a standard way to give a frozen cream texture and a roasted, almost nutty flavour. It crossed to American books readily, and in New England it collided with Boston brown bread, the steamed rye-and-molasses loaf of the Saturday-night baked bean supper, which shifts the dish toward molasses and spice. Its appearance here, reduced to a single line, says something about how these books worked: Lowney's Cook Book (1907), issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, expected a reader who had already mastered the French Ice Cream on an earlier page and needed only to be told what to stir into it.