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Chocolate Pecan Cream
1 square chocolate 2/3 cup sugar 2 tablespoons boiling water 2 cups thin cream 1 cup pecan nut-meats 2/3 teaspoon vanilla 1/8 teaspoon salt Melt the chocolate, add sugar, and cook with water until smooth and glossy. Add the cream slowly, then the salt, the pecan-meats crushed into small pieces, and the vanilla. Cool and freeze. Serve with a topping of whipped cream and a few pecan-meats. Other nuts may be used instead of the pecans, if desired.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just chocolate syrup stirred into cream and frozen. The whole texture depends on the fat in the cream, so the substitution to watch is the dairy.
- "1 square chocolate"One ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard scored square of the period. Semi-sweet or chips will make the mixture cloying against the 2/3 cup sugar.
- Thin creamLight cream, roughly 18-20% butterfat; coffee cream is the nearest modern equivalent. Half-and-half is lower in fat and will give an icier result. Whole milk alone will freeze hard and grainy; if you only have heavy cream, cut it with milk rather than using it straight.
- The chocolate paste is the hingeMelt the chocolate, beat in the sugar, then add only the two tablespoons of boiling water and cook until it is glossy and smooth. If it looks seized or grainy at this point it will stay grainy in the finished cream. Add the cream slowly to a warm, not hot, paste.
- FreezingThe recipe says only "freeze" and leaves the apparatus to the cook; a hand-cranked churn packed with ice and rock salt is the likely intent. A modern electric churn takes 20-25 minutes on a thoroughly chilled base. Still-freezing in a pan works but wants beating with a fork every 30-40 minutes for the first three hours, since there are no eggs or stabiliser to hold the texture.
- Chill before churning"Cool and freeze" means cool completely. Refrigerate the mixture several hours or overnight; a base above about 40F churns slowly and traps less air.
- The pecansToast and cool them first — raw nuts go soft and waxy once frozen in cream. Crushing them small, as directed, matters more here than in a baked dish, because large pieces freeze into hard shards.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six to eight.