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Maple Ice Cream
Add one cup maple syrup to French or Philadelphia Ice Cream. Freeze and serve with Maple Sauce.
This is a variation instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have one of the book's two ice cream bases in front of you. The practical work is in adjusting the sugar so the mixture will actually freeze hard.
- What the two bases areFrench ice cream in this period means a cooked egg-yolk custard thinned with cream; Philadelphia means cream, sugar and vanilla with no eggs at all. Either takes maple well, though the custard version buffers the syrup's minerality.
- Assume a quart baseIce cream recipes of this period are commonly built on about a quart of cream plus flavourings, though this recipe gives no quantity. One cup of syrup into that much base would be a pronounced maple flavour, which is presumably the point.
- Cut the sugar in the baseMaple syrup is about a third water and the rest sugar, so adding a cup on top of a fully sweetened custard can leave the mixture soft and slushy. Reduce the base's sugar by roughly two-thirds of a cup to keep the total in range.
- Syrup grade mattersThe dark grades sold today as Grade A Dark or Very Dark carry far more maple character than the pale early-season syrup, and that is what survives freezing. Avoid pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and will taste flat.
- Add it coldStir the syrup into the base after it has been thoroughly chilled, not into a warm custard. Warm syrup thins the mixture and slows the freezing, and a base going into the churn should be at refrigerator temperature or below.
- Freezing, then and now"Freeze" here means a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked twenty to thirty minutes. A domestic ice cream machine does the same job; churn until it holds a soft ribbon.
- RipeningFrozen creams of this period were generally packed in ice and salt and left an hour or two to harden and mellow, though this recipe does not say so. Two to three hours in the freezer accomplishes the same thing.
- The maple sauceLowney's maple sauce is given elsewhere in the book; in the absence of it, boiled-down syrup with a little cream is the same idea. Serve the sauce warm over the hardened cream, not stirred in.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, gives a good deal of space to frozen dishes at a time when the hand-crank freezer had made home-churned ice cream practical for a household with an ice delivery -- though such freezers had been in domestic use since the middle of the nineteenth century, so the shift was hardly sudden. The two base names the recipe leans on were standard trade vocabulary: French ice cream for the egg-custard style, Philadelphia for the plain cream style generally credited to that city's nineteenth-century confectioners. Maple was a natural New England flavouring here, local and comparatively cheap beside vanilla and chocolate. The instruction's brevity is itself period-typical: a cookbook of this kind assumed the reader already knew how to pack a freezer with ice and salt.