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Frozen Desserts (ROZEN desserts are refreshing)
ROZEN desserts are refreshing and wholesome and require less time in preparation than the ordinary pudding. Success, moreover, is assured if a few very simple directions are followed. The essentials are to have the ice finely crushed and to use the right proportion of coarse rock salt. The finer the ice is crushed the quicker it melts, so for this reason it is important to have the ice broken into very small pieces. Enough should be broken for the entire freezing, as the process of turning the crank should not be interrupted.
The can should be completely surrounded and covered with a mixture of ice and salt, using three parts ice to one of salt. Let it stand for a minute or two until the mixture begins to freeze to the inside of the can. Then turn the crank continuously until the mixture seems hard and heavy to move; then take out the dasher, scrape the frozen dessert from the sides of the can and pack it down closely. Put a cork in the opening of the cover, fill up the bucket with ice and salt, cover with burlap or piece of carpet and let stand an hour or more to ripen.
Do not draw off any of the water until the freezing is completed, but add ice and salt as necessary. The melted water helps to freeze the mixture in the can and need not be drawn off at all if the dessert is to be served within an hour.
The mixture should be prepared several hours before freezing and allowed to stand in the refrigerator until thoroughly chilled. Can and dasher should be scalded before using.
To crush the ice use an ice-crusher or a wooden mallet. Put the ice in a bag of burlap or canvas and pound into fine pieces. When the dessert is served, drain the salt that is in the can and save to use again. 1 egg 1 pint cream VANILLA ICE CREAM No. 1 1½ cups milk 3/4 cup sugar 1 tablespoon flour 2 teaspoons vanilla Bring the milk to a boil. Beat the egg; add the flour and half the sugar; stir into the boiling milk and put over the fire. Cook until it thickens; add the cream and the rest of the sugar; set aside to cool; add the vanilla and freeze.
Serve plain or with berries or with hot or cold chocolate sauce. VANILLA ICE CREAM No. 2 3 pints thin cream 1½ cups sugar 1 vanilla bean or 1 tablespoon extract Scald the cream with the sugar, using part milk if the cream is very rich. When cold, add the flavoring and freeze.
To prepare the bean put it in a small kettle; cover with water and let simmer until the water is half gone, keeping the kettle covered all the time. Remove from the fire; scrape each piece of bean with a blunt knife, mixing the seeds and pulp with the water and using all for the flavoring.
Two vanilla ice creams plus a full set of directions for the hand-crank freezer. The custard version is the more interesting of the two; the second is a plain Philadelphia-style cream that needs no eggs.
- Salt and ice, if you still crankThree parts crushed ice to one part coarse rock salt by volume is still the correct working ratio. More salt freezes faster but makes a coarser, grainier texture; do not use table salt, which dissolves too quickly and unevenly.
- In a modern machineBoth mixtures work in any frozen-canister or compressor churn. Chill the base thoroughly first, as the text insists, and churn until it holds the trail of the paddle, roughly 20-30 minutes. Neither recipe needs the ice-and-salt apparatus at all.
- "Ripening" is worth keepingThe hour of resting under burlap is what modern kitchens call hardening. Transfer the churned ice cream to a chilled container, press plastic wrap on the surface and freeze 2-4 hours; the texture improves markedly and the flavour opens up.
- "Thin cream"Light cream, about 18-20 percent butterfat, sold as coffee cream or single cream. Three pints is 6 cups, which will overflow most home machines with a 1.5-quart canister; halve No. 2 or churn in two batches.
- The flour in No. 1A little flour was a common insurance against a curdled custard on an unregulated stove. Cook the base to about 170-175F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; the flour lets it come to a brief boil without breaking, and it can be strained before chilling to catch any lumps.
- Scalding the canSound practice then and now, since the metal can sat in salt water and was hard to sterilise. With a modern machine, simply wash the canister and paddle and chill the canister for at least 24 hours.
- Vanilla bean methodSimmering the pod and scraping pulp and seeds into the reduced water is a thrifty way of extracting a whole bean. Splitting the pod and steeping it in the hot cream for 30 minutes gives the same result with less work; leave the pod in until the base is cold.
- YieldNo. 1 makes roughly 1 quart, six servings. No. 2 as written makes close to 2 quarts.
- Saving the brineThe instruction to drain and reuse the salt reflects a time when rock salt was worth not wasting. There is no reason to keep it now, and it should not go down a drain in quantity.
The hand-crank freezer described here was the machine that put ice cream on ordinary American tables: a can inside a wooden bucket, packed with ice and rock salt, with a dasher turned by a geared crank. The design is generally credited to Nancy Johnson, who patented an artificial freezer in 1843, and by the time this book appeared such freezers were a fixture of summer kitchens and church socials. The two recipes represent two approaches common at the time: the boiled custard, thickened with egg and a little flour so it would not curdle on a coal range, and the plain Philadelphia style of scalded cream and sugar with nothing but vanilla. The lengthy preamble on crushing ice in a burlap sack is a reminder that the ice itself was delivered in blocks by wagon.