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Chocolate Ice Cream
Dissolve 2 squares of chocolate in 2 tablespoons boiling water, add this with 3 cups sugar to 1 pint hot milk. Boil until it foams, stirring, for it burns quickly. Add 4 pints sweet milk, 1 pint heavy cream. When just lukewarm remove from fire and stir in quickly 1 tablespoon of gelatine dissolved in warm water. Let stand in a cool room until set firm, and cool, then freeze.
A Philadelphia-style (eggless) ice cream thickened with gelatine, sized for a hand-cranked freezer. The quantities are large and the sugar is heavy by modern taste.
- The chocolateA "square" is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. Dissolving it in the 2 tablespoons of boiling water first prevents it seizing into grains when it meets the milk.
- Sweet milkThis means ordinary fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that older recipes also called for. Nothing cultured is wanted here.
- Scorching is the hingeThe chocolate-sugar-milk mixture is thick and sugar-dense, and it will catch on the bottom of the pan within seconds. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, moderate heat, and keep the spoon moving; a scorched base cannot be rescued.
- The confused cooling instructionRead it as: add the remaining milk and cream, let the mixture cool off the heat, and stir in the gelatine while it is still warm enough to disperse but no longer hot. Gelatine added to a boiling mixture loses setting power; added to a cold one it strings.
- GelatineOne tablespoon of modern granulated gelatine is roughly one and a third envelopes, about 9 g. Soften it in a few tablespoons of cold water for five minutes before dissolving it in warm water, or it will lump.
- SugarThree cups in six pints of dairy is very sweet by current standards. Two cups gives a cleaner chocolate flavour, though sugar also keeps the texture soft, so going much below that will make the finished ice cream hard.
- "Then freeze"The original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first; the recipe's stand in a cool room is doing the same job as refrigerator ageing.
- YieldAbout three quarts, which will overflow most domestic ice cream makers. Halve or quarter the quantities unless you have a large churn.
Ice creams of this kind are called Philadelphia-style: no eggs, no cooked custard, just milk, cream, sugar and flavouring. Without yolks to hold the mixture together, cooks reached for gelatine, which was sold in sheets and later in granules and is often said to have been a standard stabiliser in American home ice cream from roughly the 1880s to the 1920s; letting the mixture set and cool lets the gelatine firm up along with the fat, both of which give a smoother churn. The scale of the recipe reflects how ice cream was made before household refrigeration: a bucket freezer packed with ice and salt was hard work to set up, so you made a gallon at a time and served it to a crowd the same afternoon, since there was nowhere to keep the leftovers.