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Chocolate Fig Ice Cream
4 ounces Lowney's Premium Chocolate 1 tablespoon vanilla 4 cups cream * cup sugar teaspoon salt 1½ cups finely chopped figs Melt chocolate, add sugar and one half cup cream, cook until smooth, add remaining ingredients, and freeze, stirring occasionally while freezing to keep figs from settling to the bottom.
NOTE. - If figs are soaked in wine, the flavor of the cream is much better, and there is less liability of the figs being lumpy.
A still-frozen custard-free ice cream from the era when Lowney's sold both chocolate and cookbooks to promote it. The chocolate base is cooked, the cream is added cold, and the whole thing goes into the freezer can unchurned by machine.
- The chocolateLowney's Premium was an unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate, chopped, not a bar of eating chocolate; the sugar in the recipe assumes none in the chocolate itself.
- Sugar and salt quantitiesThe amounts printed for sugar and salt have lost their fractions and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. For 4 cups of cream and 4 oz of unsweetened chocolate, something in the region of 3/4 to 1 cup sugar and a scant 1/4 teaspoon salt will work, but treat that as a judgement call rather than the book's figure.
- Making the base smoothMelt the chocolate gently, work in the sugar, then add the half cup of cream a little at a time. Adding it all at once can make the chocolate seize and go grainy, which is why the recipe has you cook it until smooth.
- Cool before freezingThe remaining cream goes in cold and the mixture should be thoroughly chilled, ideally several hours in the refrigerator, before it goes into the freezer. Freezing a warm base gives coarse ice crystals.
- The figsDried figs, stemmed and chopped fine. Soaking them, as the note suggests, is the more useful instruction than it appears: unsoaked dried fig freezes into hard nuggets that are unpleasant to bite. Sherry, Madeira or port for an hour, or hot water if you prefer no alcohol, and drain before adding.
- Stirring while it freezesThis is the hinge. In a modern freezer, still-frozen in a shallow pan, beat the mixture thoroughly every 30 minutes for the first two to three hours to break up crystals and redistribute the fruit. An ice cream machine handles both problems at once; add the figs in the last minute of churning.
- YieldFour cups of cream plus fruit makes roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten. It is a rich mixture and small servings suit it.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Hershey, issued recipe collections which doubled as advertising for its products. The chocolate recipes in it name Lowney products. The pairing of chocolate with figs points to the period's fondness for dried Mediterranean fruit, which arrived in American groceries pressed into boxes and layers. Soaking dried fruit in wine appears in period confectionery work, and the note that it prevents lumping is the more practical of its two stated reasons.