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Caramel Ice Cream
Add to French Ice Cream, one cup of caramelized sugar. Cool and freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's French Ice Cream — an egg-yolk custard base — at hand. Everything hinges on how far you take the sugar and how completely you cool the mixture before it goes into the freezer.
- Caramelized sugarOne cup of granulated sugar melted dry in a heavy pan and cooked to a deep amber, not a pale gold; pale caramel disappears into a custard and tastes only of sweetness.
- Stopping the caramelMolten sugar is roughly 340F and will keep darkening off the heat. Arrest it with a few tablespoons of hot water or hot cream, added at arm's length — it will steam and seize violently — then stir until smooth before combining with the custard.
- "French Ice Cream" in this bookA cooked custard of cream, sugar and egg yolks. It is not the uncooked cream-and-sugar "Philadelphia" style, and the yolks are what let the caramel flavour carry.
- Cool means coldChill the caramelized custard thoroughly, ideally overnight. A base that goes into the machine warm churns slowly, incorporates too much air and freezes coarse.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked for 20 to 30 minutes. A modern canister machine does the same job in about 25 minutes; either way, ripen the finished cream in the freezer for two hours before serving.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer. The shorthand of this entry — build one recipe out of another with a single added line — was common in turn-of-the-century American books, where a base custard would spawn a run of variations. Caramel as a flavour in its own right, rather than a colouring agent, appears widely in American ice creams and confectionery by the late nineteenth century, and "burnt sugar" appears in period recipes for cakes, sauces and puddings as often as for frozen cream. The distinction the book draws between French ice cream and the plainer Philadelphia style was well established by then: the French version, with its cooked yolk custard, was generally regarded as the richer of the two.