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Chocolate Ice Cream
INGREDIENTS for 8 ices. oz. of chocolate, 1/2 pint of new milk, 1 pint of cream, 1/2 lb. of white sugar. AVERAGE COST, 2s. per quart.
Scrape the chocolate into the milk and blend thoroughly, add the cream and sugar, strain, put it into the freezing machine and stir or shake till it begins to set. If it is required moulded it must be put into the mould before it gets too hard, after which it must be again set on ice.
TIME.-25 minutes to freeze.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain custard-free ice: chocolate, milk, cream, sugar, frozen and optionally moulded. Two things need attention before you start — the chocolate quantity has dropped out of the text, and the pints are imperial.
- The missing quantityThe ingredient list reads "oz. of chocolate" — the number is lost from this printing, so the recipe as given here is incomplete. Any figure filled in would be a guess; check another edition or work from a modern chocolate ice cream ratio.
- Imperial pintsBeeton's pint is 20 fl oz, so 1/2 pint of milk is 10 fl oz (1 1/4 cups) and 1 pint of cream is 20 fl oz (2 1/2 cups). Using US pints gives you a fifth less liquid and a noticeably sweeter, denser result.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and not skimmed. Whole milk is the equivalent; the cream of the period would have been roughly what is now sold as heavy or double cream.
- The chocolateBlock chocolate of this era was often plain and little sweetened, which may be part of why so much sugar is called for. If you use a sweetened bar, cut the sugar back accordingly.
- Dissolving itScraping cold chocolate into cold milk will not disperse it. Warm the milk, whisk the scraped chocolate in until smooth, then cool completely before adding the cream — this is also what the straining step is there to catch.
- Sugar and freezingHalf a pound of sugar in roughly a quart is a lot by modern taste, but it is doing structural work: sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps the texture from setting into a solid block. Cut it back sharply and the result will freeze harder and icier.
- "Freezing machine"A pot or pail packed with ice and coarse salt, worked by stirring or shaking (the recipe allows either). A domestic churn does the same job in 20-25 minutes; a still-frozen tray needs beating every 30 minutes or so to break up crystals.
- MouldingThe mould is filled at the soft-set stage and then buried in ice and salt to firm — the Victorian equivalent of ripening in the freezer. An hour or two at freezer temperature does the same, and the ice will need a few minutes at room temperature before it will turn out cleanly.
- YieldAbout a quart, which is Beeton's eight small moulded ices; four to six modern servings.
Ice cream in Mrs Beeton's household books sits in the same territory as jellies and creams — a dish that announced you had access to ice. Commercial ice, cut from lakes in winter or shipped from Norway and North America, made freezing machines practical for middle-class English kitchens by the mid-nineteenth century, and freezers working with a jacket of ice and salt were obtainable for household use by the time this list was compiled. The recipe's simplicity is notable: no eggs, no cooking, nothing but chocolate, milk, cream and sugar. The chocolate itself would have been bought as a hard plain block to be scraped or grated, the form in which cooking chocolate was generally sold before moulded eating bars became commonplace.