Home › Frozen Dishes › Cocoa Macaroon Ice Cream
Cocoa Macaroon Ice Cream
Make a cream the same as for Cocoa Nut Cream, except omit the nuts. Brown in the oven two dozen macaroons. Crumb in meat chopper; add macaroon crumbs and 1 cup sherry to cream mixture. Freeze.
A two-line recipe that depends entirely on another page, so read it alongside the base cream before starting. Everything here rests on the sherry, which is both the flavour and the technical problem.
- "Cocoa Nut" means coconutIn books of this period Cocoa Nut Cream is a coconut ice cream, not a chocolate one. This variation borrows that base and drops the coconut; where the "cocoa" of the title comes from is not explained on the page. If the base recipe is not to hand, use any plain vanilla ice cream custard or Philadelphia-style cream.
- The sherry is the hingeA full cup of sherry will noticeably depress the freezing point of a household-sized batch. Expect a soft set in a modern machine and a texture that never fully hardens in the freezer. Halving it gives a more scoopable result; keeping it all means serving the cream soft.
- MacaroonsMost likely the crisp almond macaroons of the period, close to today's amaretti, rather than French macarons. Two dozen small ones will give something in the region of a cup of crumbs, depending on size.
- Browning themThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven works. Spread them on a sheet and toast only until fragrant and a shade darker, five to eight minutes, as they are already baked and the almond turns bitter past that point.
- Meat chopperThe hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table. A food processor pulsed a few times, or a rolling pin and a bag, does the same job. Leave some texture rather than reducing everything to powder, or the crumbs vanish into the cream.
- "Freeze"The original assumes a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern churn, chill the base thoroughly first and add the crumbs and sherry near the end of churning so the crumbs stay distinct.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the size of the base cream, which the recipe does not state. Serve it the day it is made; the macaroon crumbs go soft and the alcohol keeps the texture loose in storage.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored books of the early 1900s it puts the company's product into a great many of its dishes. Its frozen-dishes chapter reflects a moment when the hand-crank ice cream freezer had become ordinary household equipment and a base cream could be varied with whatever crumbs, nuts, fruit or fortified wine was at hand. Sherry and maraschino both appear in ice creams of the period, and almond macaroons, being dry and keenly flavoured, hold their crunch better than cake. The instruction to grind them in the meat chopper is a reminder that the crank grinder was the general-purpose pulveriser of the American kitchen before electricity.