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Quick Freezing

Now, Johnny, you being right. Get you a stout oaken box bound with hoop iron if you can, to pound the ice small in. It will prove the cheapest way in the long run, for you must pound the ice small to do quick freezing and cheap, and no way beats pounding it with an old are head in a deep box. You may turn your freezer two hours and do no good if it has only large lumps of ice just touching it with their edges. It is the salt acting on the ice and releasing the cold by melting it that causes your cream to freeze and the quicker the melting takes place through thorough mixing of salt in fine ice the quicker your cream is done, and coarse salt is better than fine because it won't pack in dead lumps, and because it grinds the ice away. We are not caring for strict science, only for the effects as they appear. So the quickest possible freezing is done with snow and ice mixed together. And, Johnny, don't you remember how snorting mad you used to be when I would come down on you for about two seconds while you was see sawing away at that freezer and say "why in thunder don't you let the salt water out?"--and when I came again and found the water out it was "what in thunder did you let all the water out for?" Well, Johnny, I have no meringues in the oven now and I'll stop to explain. Your cream never freezes much except where the brine of the melted ice and salt touches the freezer, as the brine rises outside you will find the freezing mark rises inside; but when there gets to be too much water the ice rises and floats and the bottom of the freezer begins to melt again. You want to keep letting out a little water from the bung--hole near the bottom of the freezing tub but not too much, and always keep pushing and packing the ice down around the freezer to keep it solid and touching both bottom and sides. In this way you can do freezing in twenty or thirty minutes better than in two hours. The amount of salt you want is about one bucket of salt to five of broken ice. Half fill your freezing tub with ice first, then begin putting in scoopfuls of salt with the ice, and it will work itself down. Always finish off the top with a layer of salt. Don't you see now what an idiot you was not to understand these little things, and the quality of the cream for two hundred high--toners depending on your ignorance? In order to get the little brine sometimes in the dead of winter when everything was too cold I have had to pour hot water on the ice in the freezing tub to start it. These points apply to all sorts of freezers that use ice and salt. The noted cooks across the sea who nvented some of the fine ices that you are going to make after awhile Johnny, never patronized our new patent freezers but did and perhaps still do their fine work with the old kind turned by hand.