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Chocolate Ice Cream
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons sugar Custard 2 tablespoons water Mix the ingredients; heat and stir until thoroughly smooth; add them to a custard made as for Economical Ice Cream and freeze.
This is a flavoring paste rather than a full recipe — it depends on the custard base given under Economical Ice Cream elsewhere in the book. Read both before starting.
- The cross-referenceThe custard base is given under "Economical Ice Cream" elsewhere in the book, so check it as printed; bases sold as "economical" in this period commonly stretch a small number of eggs with milk and a starch thickener. Any cooked vanilla custard base will take this chocolate mixture.
- Cook the custard properlyBring the custard to 170-175F and hold it there until it coats a spoon, then cool it fully. An undercooked base will not set smoothly and a boiled one will curdle.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces is two squares of old-style baking chocolate, and it is genuinely unsweetened; the two tablespoons of sugar here are a small addition on top of whatever sweetening the custard already carries.
- Making the pasteMelt the chocolate with the water, sugar and cinnamon over low heat or a water bath and stir until it is glossy and lump-free. It combines more easily with warm custard than with cold, which can set the chocolate into gritty flecks.
- Strain and chillPush the finished base through a fine sieve and refrigerate it several hours or overnight. Cold blunts the perception of sweetness and flavour, so the base should taste slightly too sweet and too strong before freezing.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt at roughly three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern machine, churn 20-30 minutes, then harden in the freezer at least two hours; the texture is best the day it is made.
Jane Eayre Fryer's loose-leaf cook book, from the 1910s-20s, was sold in a ring binder so a housekeeper could pull single sheets onto the kitchen table and add her own pages — a format that may have something to do with terse cross-references like the one to Economical Ice Cream here. The recipe belongs to an era when a household could make ice cream with a crank freezer and a bag of ice from the delivery wagon, which is why so many books of the period carry "economical" custard bases stretched with starch. The cinnamon is the older habit: cinnamon is an Old World spice that the Spanish added to chocolate, and pairing chocolate with cinnamon rather than vanilla persisted in Spanish and Mexican practice long after American cooks generally dropped it.