Home › Frozen Dishes › Nougat Ice Cream
Nougat Ice Cream
Add one half cup each of chopped walnuts, almonds, and filberts, to French or Philadelphia Ice Cream. Flavor with one teaspoon vanilla and one teaspoon almond.
Freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have a base recipe and a hand-crank freezer. The decisions the original leaves unspoken are where the dish is won or lost.
- Which baseFrench ice cream means a cooked custard base thickened with egg yolks; Philadelphia means cream, sugar and vanilla with no eggs at all. The custard gives a richer, softer body that suits the nuts; the Philadelphia version freezes harder and tastes cleaner. The recipe gives no quantity, but the nuts as listed suit roughly 1 quart of base.
- FilbertsFilberts are hazelnuts. Rub the skins off in a towel after toasting or they will make the cream bitter and speckled.
- Toast the nutsThe recipe does not say to, but raw walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts stirred into cream go soft and taste of nothing. Toast all three at 350F for 8-10 minutes, cool completely, then chop.
- When to add themFold the nuts in during the last two or three minutes of churning, once the mixture has thickened. Added at the start they sink and jam the dasher.
- The almond extractOne teaspoon of almond extract in a quart is assertive by modern standards, and the strength of period almond flavourings varied. Start with half a teaspoon and taste the unfrozen base.
- Freezing"Freeze" means a churn packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked 15-20 minutes. A modern machine does the same job; either way the base must be refrigerator-cold before it goes in.
- HardeningStraight from the churn this is soft. Pack it into a chilled container and give it 2-3 hours in the freezer before serving, or the nuts will not have set into the cream.
- YieldIf a quart of base is used, about 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a dessert course.
"Nougat" on a late-nineteenth-century American menu usually signalled nuts rather than the chewy Provencal confection itself: nougat cake, nougat filling and nougat ice cream all meant almonds and their kin, sometimes caramelized, folded into something sweet. The word comes through Provencal/Occitan nogat, from a word for nut descending from Latin nux, and the confection is generally traced to Mediterranean France and Italy, where honey-and-almond pastes had been made for centuries. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it treats ice cream as a matter of two mother recipes with a long list of one-line variations hung off them. That structure tells you something about the period kitchen: a household with a crank freezer and a supply of ice made ice cream often enough that a cook needed suggestions, not instructions.