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Cocoa Nut Cream Ice
1/2 cup Lowney's Cocoa teaspoon salt 1 cup walnuts 2 cups cream Mix cocoa, flour, sugar and salt; add eggs slightly beaten. When well blended, add scalded milk. Cook in double boiler, stirring constantly, twenty minutes. Add nuts finely chopped, flavoring and cream. Freeze.
A cooked cocoa custard, enriched with cream and walnuts, then churned in an ice-cream freezer. The method is sound; the proportions need filling in from standard custard practice.
- Unstated quantitiesAmounts are given only for cocoa, salt, walnuts and cream. For the base, a workable standard proportion is 2 cups milk, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour and 2 eggs; treat these as a reconstruction rather than the book's figures.
- CocoaLowney's was almost certainly a natural (non-alkalized) cocoa, as American cocoa powders of the period generally were: more acidic and sharper in flavour than Dutch-process. Any unsweetened natural cocoa works; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder result.
- The hinge: cook the custard throughTwenty minutes in a double boiler with constant stirring is not excessive here. The flour needs that long to lose its raw taste and the starch to set the eggs, and the water bath keeps the mixture from curdling.
- Chill before churningThe custard must be cold, ideally refrigerated several hours, before it goes into the freezer. Adding the cream to a warm base and freezing immediately gives a coarse, grainy texture.
- "Flavoring"Unspecified, as was common when vanilla was assumed. About a teaspoon of vanilla extract suits the cocoa; stir it in after cooking so it does not cook off.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt. A modern ice-cream machine does the same work; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat thoroughly two or three times as it sets.
- WalnutsChop finely and add at the end as directed. Toasting them briefly first keeps them from tasting soft and damp once frozen.
- YieldUsing the reconstructed 2 cups of milk along with the 2 cups of cream, the base comes to something over a quart; churned, roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving about eight. The figure moves with whatever milk quantity you settle on.
Walter M. Lowney's Boston chocolate company issued this book as promotional literature. The title reflects older usage in which "cream ice" and "ice cream" were often used interchangeably, though some period books did distinguish ices from ice creams, and "cocoa nut" here means cocoa plus nuts rather than coconut, a collision of spellings that was common when coconut itself was still frequently printed as two words. Cooked, flour-thickened custard bases like this one were common in American home freezing: cheaper than an all-cream Philadelphia-style mixture, and far more forgiving of the uneven churning a hand-crank machine produced.