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Rose Ice Cream
1 quart of cream. 12 ounces of sugar. 12 eggs.
A pinch of salt, coloring and flavoring.
Take off a third of the cream, the thickest, from the top, and keep it cold to be whipped to froth, while the other is freezing. Boil the rest of the cream with the sugar in it, which prevents burning. Beat the eggs in a bowl as light as if for sponge cake, pour the boiling cream and sugar to them and cook about a minute together--enough to slightly thicken but not boil. Strain into a freezer immediately, add a few drops of rose extract and some bright red fruit syrup such as the surplus juice from crimson strawberries in sugar, or else some drops of red coloring, to make the cream light pink. Freeze, and when nearly finished whip the reserved cream to froth and beat it in. When cream thick enough to whip cannot be had keep out the whites of the eggs and use the same way instead.
A rich frozen custard, essentially a French-style ice cream lightened at the end with whipped cream. The instructions assume unhomogenized cream that separates in the pail and a hand-cranked bucket freezer; both need translating.
- The cream, divided"Take off a third of the cream, the thickest, from the top" assumes raw, unhomogenized cream that separates on standing. Simply reserve 1 1/3 cups of heavy whipping cream, cold, and use the remaining 2 2/3 cups for the custard.
- Sugar by weight12 ounces of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups granulated. Twelve eggs to a quart of cream is a very rich custard by modern standards; use large eggs.
- "Cook about a minute--enough to slightly thicken but not boil"This is the hinge. Temper the beaten eggs with the boiling cream, return to low heat and stir until the custard coats a spoon, 175-180F. Past 185F it curdles; straining, as the recipe directs, catches anything that does.
- "A freezer"Not a modern appliance freezer but a hand-crank churn: a metal canister in a bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt. An electric or frozen-bowl machine does the same work. Chill the strained custard thoroughly first; the original goes straight into the freezer hot.
- Rose extract versus rose waterRose extract is concentrated and a few drops is genuinely the dose. If you have only rose water, which is far weaker, you will need a tablespoon or two, and it is easy to tip a dessert into soap territory. Add, taste, add again.
- The coloringStrawberry syrup gives both color and a little flavor and is the better choice. If using food coloring, one or two drops is enough; the recipe asks for light pink, not red.
- Folding in the whipped creamWhip the reserved cream to soft peaks and beat it into the ice cream when the churn is nearly done. This lightens the texture considerably. If your machine has no room, fold it in by hand as you transfer the ice cream to a container, then harden in the freezer 2-3 hours.
- The egg-white substitutionWhere no cream thick enough to whip could be had, the author holds back the whites, whips them, and beats those in instead. That means raw whipped whites beaten into a chilled base; use pasteurized whites if you take that route.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; a quart of cream with twelve eggs makes a large batch, comfortably serving eight to ten.
Rose was one of the standard confectioner's flavors long before vanilla eclipsed it, and rose water sat on American pantry shelves through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, used in cakes, custards and puddings. Bottled flavoring extracts, rose among them, were sold commercially by the later nineteenth century, and colored ices were commonly tinted to match their flavor -- pink for rose, pale green for pistachio. The reliance on the top third of the cream is a marker of the period: before homogenization became general, cream was skimmed by hand, and a recipe could reasonably assume the cook knew which part of the pail would whip.