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Hickory Nut Ice Cream
1 pound of either pecan or hickory nut kernels. 12 ounces of sugar. 1 quart of rich milk or cream. 1 tablespoonful of burnt sugar coloring. Pick over the kernels carefully that there be no fragments of shells to make the cream gritty, then pound them in a mortar with part of the sugar and a few spoonfuls of milk or other fluid. Only a few can be pounded effectually at a time. Mix the milk with the pulp thus obtained, the rest of the sugar and caramel coloring enough to make it like coffee and cream, and run it through a strainer into the freezer.
Freeze it as usual and beat smooth with the paddle, then pack down with more ice to freeze firm.
Line the moulds with the cherry ice and fill the middle with the cream, or, dish the ice as a border in shallow glasses with the cream piled in the center.
A nut ice cream from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, built on pounded nuts rather than a cooked custard. Two things decide whether it works: how finely the nuts are broken down, and how well you strain.
- Weights and volumes12 ounces of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups granulated. A quart of "rich milk" most likely means whole milk with cream in it; whole milk plus a cup of heavy cream, or straight half-and-half, is the closest modern match. A pound of shelled nut kernels is roughly 4 cups.
- The mortar, replacedThe instruction to pound only a few kernels at a time with sugar and a spoonful of liquid is the 19th-century route to nut butter. A food processor does it in minutes: pulse the nuts with the sugar first, then dribble in milk until you have a smooth paste. Do not let it heat up and turn oily.
- Straining is not optionalThe single most important step. Hickory and pecan kernels carry papery skins and fibre that no amount of pounding fully breaks down, and unstrained they read as grit. Press the mixture through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth and discard what will not go through.
- Burnt sugar coloringCaramel cooked dark to the point of bitterness and let down with a little water after it stops smoking. A tablespoon is a colorant, not a flavor; the target shade is stated in the recipe as coffee and cream. Dark caramel syrup or a few drops of gravy browning will stand in.
- "The freezer" and "pack down with more ice"A freezer here is a canister set in a wooden pail of ice and rock salt, cranked by hand, and packing down means burying the sealed canister in fresh ice and salt to harden. In a modern machine, churn to soft-serve thickness, then transfer to a chilled container and freeze three to four hours.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is rarely sold commercially and is mostly foraged; the recipe's own alternative, pecans, is the practical choice and belongs to the same genus. Toast either lightly and cool completely before grinding — the original assumes raw kernels, but toasting deepens the flavor considerably.
- No eggs, so texture needs helpWith nothing but milk, sugar and nut solids, this sets hard and grainy after a day. Eat it within a few hours of churning, or add a tablespoon of light corn syrup to the mix to keep it scoopable.
- The cherry ice and yield"Line the moulds with the cherry ice" points to a separate cherry water ice, presumably given elsewhere in the book — an ice rather than a cream. The quart of dairy plus a pound of nuts should yield roughly 1 1/2 quarts finished, or eight to ten servings in the shallow-glass presentation described.
Nut ice creams appear in the American confectioner's repertoire in the second half of the 19th century, and hickory nut belonged to the domestic, non-imported end of it: shagbark hickory grows across the eastern and midwestern United States, and the nuts were more often gathered than bought, which may be why the recipe can casually offer pecans as the substitute. The method here — pounding kernels in a mortar with sugar and a little liquid, a technique with precedents in the almond milks and marzipans of European confectionery — was one of the few ways to get nut flavor into a frozen cream before mechanical grinders were common in kitchens. The instruction to tint the mixture with burnt sugar to the color of coffee and cream reflects a concern with appearance that runs through books of this kind: a molded, shaped, colored dessert was meant to look composed.