Vanilla Ice Cream
INGREDIENTS for ¼ quart.-1 pint of cream, 1/2 pint of milk, 1 pod of vanilla, 1 lb. of sugar, juice of 1 lemon, yolks of 2 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Pound the pod in a mortar, with the sugar, press it through a sieve, then place in a stewpan, with the milk and eggs, and stir over a gentle fire till the mixture thickens like custard; add the cream and lemon-juice, then strain and freeze.
TIME.-25 minutes to freeze.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Veal, Baked. (Cold Meat Cookery.) -INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 persons. lb. of cold roast veal, a few slices of bacon, 1 pint of bread-crumbs, pint of good veal gravy, 1/2 teaspoonful of minced lemon-peel, 1 blade of pounded mace, cayenne and salt to taste, 4 eggs. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold veal and gravy, 9d.
Mince finely the veal and bacon; add the bread-crumbs, gravy, and seasoning, and stir these ingredients well together. Beat up the eggs thoroughly; add these, mix the whole well together, put in a dish, and bake from 3/4 to 1 hour. When liked, a little good gravy may be served in a tureen as an accompaniment.
TIME. From to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
A straightforward egg-custard ice cream, notable for flavouring the sugar with the whole vanilla pod rather than an extract. The wording assumes an ice-and-salt freezing pail, and the sugar quantity should be read with care.
- The hinge: cook the custard, do not scramble itMilk, sugar and yolks want a gentle heat and constant stirring until the mixture coats the spoon, around 175-180F. Two yolks in the half-pint of milk make a thin custard that will curdle quickly over direct heat; a heavy pan on low heat, or a bowl over simmering water, is safer.
- Sugar quantityOne pound of sugar to a quart of finished cream is roughly twice what a modern custard ice uses, and would give a very sweet base that freezes soft. The figure may well be a misprint for a smaller weight; around 4 to 8 oz is the usual range for this volume of dairy.
- Pounding the podSplitting the pod and grinding it with the sugar, then sieving, gives an intensely flavoured vanilla sugar and specks of seed throughout. If you have no mortar, a spice grinder does the same work; alternatively steep a split pod in the warm milk for 20 minutes and scrape in the seeds.
- StewpanA stewpan here is simply a saucepan with straight sides, not a stew pot. Any heavy-based pan of a quart or so will do.
- The lemon juiceAdded off the heat with the cream, it sharpens the sweetness. Add it once the custard has cooled a little and strain immediately, since acid dropped into hot dairy can cause it to separate.
- "25 minutes to freeze"That timing belongs to a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt. In a domestic machine, chill the strained custard thoroughly first (four hours or overnight), then churn 20 to 30 minutes and firm it in the freezer for an hour or two.
- YieldAbout one quart, which serves four to six as a dessert course.
- Average costTwo shillings for a quart of ice cream was a substantial sum in this book's terms; the price reflects both the cream and the imported vanilla pod.
Vanilla pods reached British kitchens as an expensive colonial import, and in Mrs Beeton's day they were still handled like a spice: bought whole, pounded with sugar, and made to go as far as possible. That accounts for the mortar-and-sieve method here, which extracts flavour from the whole pod rather than steeping and discarding it. Ice cream itself was a display dish for the same reason as the vanilla: before mechanical refrigeration, a household needed access to an ice house or the ice trade, plus coarse salt and a freezing pail, so the frozen course signalled money and staff as much as skill. The lemon juice is a period habit worth noticing, appearing in many nineteenth-century ices to keep a rich custard from tasting flat.