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Macaroon Ice Cream
Add one cup dried and pounded macaroons to French or Philadelphia Ice Cream; flavor with one half teaspoon almond extract, one tablespoon sherry, and one half teaspoon vanilla. Freeze.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have a batch of ice cream base from elsewhere in the book. A few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- Which base, and how muchFrench ice cream is a cooked custard base built on egg yolks; Philadelphia is plain sweetened cream with no eggs. The recipe does not say how much base it assumes; check the book's own base recipes and scale the flavorings to whatever quantity they make.
- Macaroons means almondIn 1907 a macaroon here most likely meant the almond-and-egg-white confection, crisp and dry, rather than the French macaron shell, though coconut macaroons were also in circulation in American books of the period. Italian amaretti are the closest common equivalent; a cup of them, crushed, is roughly 2 to 3 oz depending on how coarsely you crush them.
- Dried and poundedStale the macaroons in a 250F oven until they snap, then crush to coarse crumbs. Undried cookies turn to paste in the churn and the texture goes muddy rather than speckled.
- When to add the crumbsStir them in during the last minute or two of churning, or fold them through as you pack. Crumbs added at the start absorb liquid for the whole freeze and lose all their bite.
- Almond extract, then and nowA half teaspoon of modern extract is assertive. Combined with the amaretti it can tip into marzipan territory, so taste the base before freezing and hold back if it reads as candy.
- The sherryA tablespoon of alcohol per quart lowers the freezing point slightly, which keeps the ice cream a touch softer. It is not enough to stop it setting, but do not increase it freehand.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt. Any modern machine works; churn to soft-serve consistency, then harden in the freezer for at least four hours before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; it depends on the size of the base batch you start from.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its dessert and frozen chapters run long and confidently. Frozen dishes were still a mark of an ambitious household in the early 1900s, and a book of this sort might give one or two mother recipes, French and Philadelphia, followed by pages of one-line variations like this one. The distinction is worth knowing: Philadelphia ice cream, named for the city whose confectioners were said to have popularised it, is uncooked cream and sugar, while the French style leans on an egg custard. Almond macaroons had been a standard confectioner's item in Europe for centuries and, dried hard, were a convenient way to carry both almond flavor and a little texture into a cream, a trick that also shows up in period trifles, puddings and charlottes.