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Pistachio Ice Cream
Mix one half cup Pistachio nuts chopped fine, and one cup almonds chopped fine, with Philadelphia Ice Cream. Color a delicate green and flavor with one teaspoon almond. Freeze.
A note on an existing recipe rather than a standalone one: it assumes you have already made the book's Philadelphia Ice Cream, an uncooked base of cream and sugar with no eggs. Everything here is an addition to that.
- Philadelphia Ice CreamThe base is an uncooked, eggless one, cream sweetened with sugar and lightly flavored, frozen without cooking; the book's own recipe supplies the proportions, typically around a quart of cream. Modern custard-style bases will also carry the nuts, but they mute the clean dairy flavor the original relies on.
- Quantities are proportioned to a quartQuantities appear proportioned to a quart of base -- assuming that, a half cup of pistachios plus a full cup of almonds is a lot of nut. If you want the almonds only as background, cut them to a half cup and the result reads more clearly as pistachio.
- The almond extract is the flavorThis is the hinge. What many people recognize as "pistachio" is almond, and a single teaspoon of extract does most of the work here. In this recipe the pistachios contribute little beyond color and texture.
- Chop, or grind"Chopped fine" gives a nubbly ice cream. For a smoother result, grind part of the pistachios to a paste with a spoonful of the sugar and stir that into the cream, reserving the rest chopped.
- Blanch the pistachiosRubbing the skins off after a brief soak in hot water gives a much greener nut and a cleaner-tasting cream. Skins left on turn the mixture brownish and slightly bitter.
- The green colorPeriod kitchens used spinach juice or a bottled vegetable green; some nineteenth-century greens were mineral-based and are long off the market. Use modern gel food coloring, a drop at a time, and stop while it still looks pale.
- FreezingThe original means a hand-crank freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt, about three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern machine, churn 20 to 25 minutes, fold in the chopped nuts near the end, then harden in the freezer for at least four hours.
- YieldIf the base is a quart, expect roughly one and a half quarts once the nuts are added, or eight to ten servings.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, which explains why the book leans so heavily on confectionery and frozen desserts. Pistachio ice cream is a good illustration of how an American flavor name could drift from the nut it claimed: pistachios were expensive imports, so the character of the dish came from cheap almonds and almond extract, with the pistachios contributing color and a few visible flecks, reinforced by tinting. "Philadelphia" ice cream, the base called for here, is the eggless kind, sweetened cream frozen plain, and it was generally set against the richer French or custard style in American books of the period; Philadelphia's early nineteenth-century confectioners are usually credited with the name, though the attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented.