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Cocoa Cocoanut Cream
Make a cream the same as for Cocoa Nut Cream, except omit the nuts, and add one cup of shredded cocoanut and the rind and juice of one lemon.
Freeze. 2 eggs 11 cups sugar cup flour 2 cups milk
A flour-thickened boiled custard, frozen — the economical American ice-cream base of the early 1900s, here flavoured with coconut and lemon. Two things need settling before you start: the base it refers back to, and the ingredient quantities.
- On the measurementsThe ingredient amounts were checked against the printed page and stand as given here. If you want a guide to proportion, a custard base of this type runs about two-thirds to one cup of sugar and two to three tablespoons of flour to two cups of milk.
- Cocoanut is coconut"Shredded cocoanut" in 1907 meant dried unsweetened shred, or freshly grated meat. Modern sweetened flake will push an already sweet custard over the edge; use unsweetened, and consider toasting half of it for flavour.
- The flour custard must actually boilStarch-thickened bases taste pasty unless the flour is fully cooked. Whisk the flour smooth with a little cold milk, cook the milk mixture until it thickens and bubbles, hold it a minute or two, then temper in the beaten eggs and cook gently to about 175F without letting it break.
- Add the lemon last, off the heatThis is the hinge. Lemon juice stirred into hot milk custard will curdle it. Chill the base thoroughly, then stir in the grated rind and the juice a little at a time just before churning.
- Chill before freezing"Freeze" meant a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. In a modern machine the base still needs to be cold — refrigerate it at least four hours, ideally overnight, or it will churn to slush.
- Texture and storageStarch in the base helps limit iciness, but the ice cream will still set very firm in a home freezer. Let it stand ten minutes at room temperature before serving.
- YieldTwo cups of milk plus additions makes roughly a quart, or four to six modest servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 under the name of the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and written by Maria Willett Howard; like many manufacturer cookbooks it mixes general household recipes with dishes that flatter the sponsor's product. The frozen-dishes chapter belongs to the era when the hand-crank ice-cream freezer had become an ordinary piece of American kitchen equipment, and period books offer plenty of boiled flour-custard bases alongside those thickened with egg yolks alone. "Cocoanut" was a common American spelling well into the twentieth century; it is usually explained as a conflation of "coco" (the palm) with "cocoa" (cacao).