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Cocoa Ice Cream
2 cups milk 1 cup sugar 2 cups cream, or 2 cups milk and 1 tablespoon cornstarch 2 tablespoons butter or arrowroot to½ cup Lowney's Cocoa 4 egg yolks 1 teaspoon vanilla + teaspoon salt Mix cocoa, sugar, and cornstarch or arrowroot; add scalded milk, and cook twenty minutes in double boiler. Beat eggs; add cream, or milk and butter; pour on to this mixture, cornstarch mixture. Add vanilla and freeze. One cup raspberry juice added just before freezing gives a pleasant variety. See colored illustration, Plate XVII, opposite.
A cooked cocoa custard base for a hand-crank freezer, written when cornstarch or arrowroot was used to give body that a churn could not. The quantities are workable once the ambiguous ones are pinned down.
- Cocoa quantityThe cocoa is given as a range that has lost its lower figure; a third to a half cup of unsweetened cocoa suits this volume of dairy. Lowney's sold a plain unsweetened breakfast cocoa, so an ordinary unsweetened cocoa powder stands in directly.
- SaltThe salt figure is incomplete. A quarter teaspoon is right for two cups milk plus two cups cream; the salt is there to sharpen the chocolate, not to be tasted.
- Thickener choiceYou use cornstarch or arrowroot only in the all-milk version, where 1 tablespoon plus 2 tablespoons butter substitutes for the fat of cream. With real cream, skip both. Arrowroot sets softer and clearer than cornstarch and should not be boiled hard once thickened.
- The double boilerTwenty minutes over simmering water fully hydrates the starch and cooks out any raw, chalky taste from the cocoa. Do not shortcut it on direct heat, where cocoa solids scorch on the pan bottom.
- Bringing the yolks up to temperatureAs written, the yolks are combined with the cream and the hot cocoa mixture is poured over. That tempering alone may not carry the mixture high enough to set the custard or to pasteurize the eggs. Return everything to the double boiler and stir until it reaches 170-175F and coats a spoon, then strain and chill thoroughly before freezing.
- Chill before churningThe recipe says nothing about cooling the base before freezing. In a modern machine the base must be refrigerated to about 40F, ideally overnight, or it will never freeze properly.
- FreezingAn ice-and-rock-salt bucket freezer works exactly as described; a domestic machine takes 20-30 minutes, after which the ice cream needs two to three hours in the freezer to firm. Add the vanilla only after the base is cold, so it is not driven off by heat.
- The raspberry variationA cup of raspberry juice added cold just before churning thins the base and lowers its freezing point, so expect a softer, more granular result. Strain the juice to keep seeds out.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half, or eight to ten small servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to the large family of American cookbooks issued by food firms to teach cooks new uses for a branded product. The chocolate recipes name Lowney's cocoa, and the color plates -- an expensive feature for a cookbook of the era -- functioned as advertising as much as instruction. The recipe itself shows the transitional moment in home ice cream making: an egg-yolk custard in the French manner, but hedged with starch and an all-milk option for households that could not count on good cream, and frozen in a hand-cranked bucket packed with ice and rock salt. Chocolate and cocoa ices had been made in Europe since the eighteenth century, but cheap, finely milled cocoa of the sort Lowney sold is what put them within reach of an ordinary American kitchen.