Home › Frozen Desserts › Caramel Ice Cream
Caramel Ice Cream
1/4 cup flour 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 pint cream 1 egg Pinch of salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla Heat the milk in a double boiler, saving a half cup to mix the flour and half of the sugar. Add these and cook for twenty minutes. Melt the second quantity of sugar until it is brown and syrupy; add to the cooked custard together with the beaten egg. Beat until free from lumps; cool and add the flavoring and cream.
This page comes from a loose-leaf book, and the ingredient column has clearly lost a line or two: the method calls for milk, flour and two separate quantities of sugar that never appear in the list. Anyone making it is reconstructing the proportions, so treat the figures below as a working reading rather than the author's own.
- The missing quantitiesOnly cream, egg, salt and vanilla are listed, yet the method uses milk, flour and sugar in two lots. Standard proportions for a frozen custard of this size are 1 pint milk, 1 tablespoon flour, and about 1/2 cup sugar for the custard with another 1/2 cup to caramelize. This is inference, not what the page says.
- Caramel is the whole pointThe second lot of sugar is melted dry until brown and syrupy — take it to a deep amber, just short of smoking, because the flavour lives in that browning. Pale caramel gives a sweet ice cream that tastes of nothing in particular.
- Adding hot caramel safelyMolten sugar is far above the boiling point of water and will spit violently when it meets the custard. Pour it in slowly, off the heat, stirring constantly, and keep hands and forearms clear.
- Cook the eggThe single beaten egg goes into the custard at the end, which in the original leaves it barely cooked. Return the mixture to the double boiler after adding it and hold it until it reaches 170F and coats a spoon, then strain it — this also disposes of the lumps the author warns about.
- "Heat the milk in a double boiler"The twenty minutes is for the flour, not the egg: starch needs sustained heat to lose its raw taste and thicken properly. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving here.
- FreezingThe page gives no freezing instructions. A frozen custard of this date would have gone into a hand-crank freezer, typically packed with something like three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt and churned for twenty minutes or so. In a modern machine, chill the custard thoroughly — overnight is better than two hours — then churn to soft-serve consistency and firm it in the freezer.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities — a pint of cream plus a pint of milk — the churned result would come to roughly 1 1/2 quarts, or six to eight servings.
Caramel ice cream sits alongside the burnt-sugar cakes, caramel custards and caramel frostings that crowd American cookbooks of the same period. This one is a frozen custard stiffened with a little flour — a thrifty touch common in household manuals, where flour stretched the eggs and helped insure the mixture against curdling in the hands of an inexperienced cook. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in loose-leaf form so that pages could be added, replaced or clipped into a binder, which may well be how the ingredient list on this page came to lose a line. A frozen-desserts chapter of this kind assumes a hand-cranked freezer and a supply of ice and rock salt.