Home › Frozen Dishes › Chocolate Philadelphia Ice Cream
Chocolate Philadelphia Ice Cream
2 ounces Lowney's Premium Chocolate, or 1 cup sugar ½ cup Lowney's Cocoa 1/4 cup hot water 4 cups light cream + teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Melt chocolate, add remaining ingredients, and freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just sweetened cream frozen with chocolate. The text as printed is compressed and one measurement has clearly been mangled in transcription.
- Reading the ingredient listThe line offers a choice: 2 ounces of unsweetened block chocolate or ½ cup cocoa. The rest is 1 cup sugar, ¼ cup hot water, 4 cups light cream, salt, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
- The salt is ambiguous"+ teaspoon salt" is a corrupted fraction, almost certainly ⅛ or ¼ teaspoon. Use a pinch to ¼ teaspoon; the salt is there to sharpen the chocolate, not to season.
- Lowney's Premium ChocolateAn unsweetened baking chocolate from the Walter M. Lowney Company, which published this book. Any modern unsweetened baking chocolate stands in at the same weight. Lowney's cocoa was most likely natural rather than Dutch-processed, as most American cocoas of the period were.
- Melt with the water, not dryWork the chocolate or cocoa smooth with the ¼ cup hot water into a thin paste before the cream goes in. Cocoa dropped straight into cold cream will stay grainy and never fully disperse.
- Dissolve the sugar firstNothing here is cooked, so the sugar has to dissolve in the chocolate-and-water paste while it is still warm. Undissolved sugar gives a gritty ice cream.
- Light creamAbout 18-20 percent butterfat — modern light cream or single cream, or half heavy cream and half whole milk. Using all heavy cream will churn toward butter in a hand freezer.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerAn ice-and-rock-salt bucket freezer. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first — churning a room-temperature base gives a coarse, icy texture.
- YieldRoughly 1¼ quarts of mixture before churning; expect somewhat more than that once frozen, serving about eight.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, is a manufacturer's cookbook: Lowney's chocolate and cocoa are named in recipe after recipe, and the book's job was to put a chocolate box in the American pantry as a standing ingredient rather than an occasional treat. The dish itself belongs to a real nineteenth-century distinction. "Philadelphia" ice cream meant cream, sugar and flavoring frozen without eggs, as against "French" ice cream built on a cooked custard — the plainer style being generally credited to the confectioners of Philadelphia, which had a reputation for ice cream well before the Civil War. The result is cleaner and colder on the tongue than a custard ice cream, and it depends entirely on the quality of the cream, since there is nothing else in it to hide behind.