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Chocolate Ice Cream
Use only 3 or 4 ounces of the common unsweeteened chocolate to a gallon of cream or boiled custard. Chocolate cream is generally too strongly flavored for the majority. The foreign vanilla chocolates about half sugar and more of course can be used. Boil the chocolate in some milk with sugar added, strain it into the cream and flavor with vanilla besides. Beat the ice cream to make it bright and rich colored. Melted chocolate cannot be mixed at once in cold cream, as it sets and makes trouble, it must be considerably diluted first.
A professional's note rather than a formula: it assumes you already have a gallon of sweetened cream or custard base and only need to know how to get chocolate into it. Scale down and the proportions still hold.
- The hinge: dilute the chocolate firstMelted chocolate hitting cold cream seizes into gritty flecks that no amount of beating will fix. Boil it with milk and sugar into a smooth, pourable syrup, then strain that into the base — and it helps to temper by whisking a ladle of the cold base into the hot chocolate before combining.
- Scaling the gallon3-4 oz unsweetened chocolate per gallon works out to roughly 3/4 to 1 oz per quart. For a quart of base, 1 oz (about 28 g) sits at the top of Whitehead's range and reads as clearly chocolate; 3/4 oz gives the lighter end he also allows.
- "Common unsweetened chocolate"Plain cacao liquor in cake form, the ancestor of today's baking chocolate — no sugar, no added cocoa butter, no lecithin. Modern unsweetened baking bars are a direct substitute. Do not swap in cocoa powder one for one; it has most of the fat pressed out.
- "Foreign vanilla chocolates about half sugar"Imported sweet eating chocolate, roughly 50 percent sugar — closest today to a 45-55% dark bar. If you use one, cut the sugar in the base by about half the weight of chocolate added, or the finished cream will be cloying.
- Boiled custardA stirred custard of egg yolks, milk or cream and sugar, cooked to the coating stage (170-175F) and no further. Whitehead treats it as an alternative to plain cream here, and it needs to be chilled thoroughly before freezing.
- Vanilla "besides"The instruction is deliberate: vanilla added on top of the chocolate rounds the flavor and reads as richer. About a tablespoon of extract per gallon, or a scraped bean steeped in the hot milk.
- "Beat the ice cream"Most likely working the part-frozen mixture in the can to lighten and smooth it; what Whitehead means by "bright" is not spelled out, though aeration is a plausible reading. A modern churn does the equivalent on its own; simply avoid underfilling the bowl and let it churn until thick.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago cook and trade writer of the 1880s and 90s whose books were addressed to hotel and restaurant men rather than housekeepers — which is why the unit of measure here is the gallon and why the entry reads as advice from one professional to another. His caution that "chocolate cream is generally too strongly flavored for the majority" suggests the flavor was a harder sell than vanilla or lemon. The "foreign vanilla chocolates" he offers as an alternative would have been sweetened eating chocolates imported from Europe. The seizing problem he describes is genuine chemistry — a small amount of cold liquid in melted chocolate makes the sugar and cocoa solids clump — and his fix, dilute before combining, is still the standard answer.