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Philadelphia Ice Cream
3 cups heavy cream and one cup milk 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon flavoring ¼ teaspoon salt Mix the ingredients and freeze without cooking.
A no-cook custard-free ice cream that depends entirely on the quality of the cream, since nothing in it is heated and nothing masks a stale dairy flavor. It works in any modern churn, but the sugar must be fully dissolved before the mixture goes in.
- Dissolve the sugar firstWith no cooking step, undissolved sugar crystals stay gritty through the freezing. Whisk the sugar and salt into the milk until you cannot feel any grain against the bowl, then stir in the cream.
- The salt quantityAs printed, the salt amount has lost its fraction and reads as an implausible four teaspoons; a quarter teaspoon is the most likely original, though a pinch to half a teaspoon appears in comparable recipes. Salt here sharpens flavor rather than seasoning.
- "Heavy cream"Period cream was not standardized, but what was sold as heavy cream was rich, broadly comparable to today's heavy whipping cream. Avoid ultra-pasteurized if you can find an alternative, as it carries a faint cooked note this recipe has nothing to hide behind.
- FlavoringA tablespoon would most often be vanilla extract, which is generous but reasonable for a quart of dairy; cold mutes flavor. If you substitute a fruit puree or coffee, add it by taste and account for the extra liquid, which will soften the finished texture.
- FreezingIn a hand-crank or electric churn, chill the mixture thoroughly to refrigerator temperature before churning, or it will freeze slowly. Salt-to-ice proportions for a bucket freezer vary, with roughly one part rock salt to three or four parts crushed ice commonly given.
- RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft-serve consistency. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two to firm up; the book's contemporaries called this ripening.
- YieldA quart of dairy plus the sugar churns up to roughly a quart and a quarter to a quart and a half, serving six to eight.
- Raw dairyThe recipe predates routine pasteurization. Use pasteurized cream and milk, and note that the mixture keeps far less well than a cooked custard base.
Philadelphia ice cream is the American term for ice cream made from cream, sugar and flavoring alone, with no eggs and no cooked custard, as opposed to the French style built on a boiled egg base. The name is generally traced to Philadelphia's early reputation for confectioners and ice cream sellers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though this is traditional explanation rather than established fact, and by the time this book was compiled the term functioned simply as a category label in cookbooks rather than a regional claim. Its appearance in a chocolate company's cookbook is unsurprising: an uncooked base takes chocolate, cocoa or a flavoring syrup readily, and it demanded nothing of the cook but good cream and a working freezer, of the sort provided by a hand-cranked bucket churn.