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Burnt Almond Ice Cream
Put over the fire ¼ pound raw almonds and ¼ pound sugar until the sugar has taken on a delicious brown. Turn the batch, put on a greased slab and let it cool, then pound in a mortar. Put it into 3 quarts cream, add 1½ pounds flour and some vanilla flavoring. Cook as for other cream, then strain and freeze.
A soda-fountain formula written for a confectioner working in gallons, with a flour-thickened base rather than an egg custard. The scale and one measurement need attention before you start.
- "Burnt" means caramelized, not scorchedAlmonds and sugar are cooked together until the sugar melts and turns amber — the dry-caramel praline method. Stir constantly over medium heat; once the sugar goes past deep amber it turns bitter and the whole flavor of the ice cream goes with it.
- The greased slabA confectioner's marble slab, oiled so the brittle releases. A sheet pan lined with parchment or a silicone mat does the same job. Spread the mass thin so it cools fast and snaps cleanly.
- Pounding in place of a mortarA food processor works, but pulse in short bursts. Ground continuously, the oily almonds and sugar slump into a paste; you want a coarse, gritty praline powder.
- "½ pounds flour" is unclearAs printed this is ambiguous — half a pound of flour in 3 quarts of cream is a heavy, almost pudding-like starch load, and the plural "pounds" suggests a typesetting slip. Treat the quantity as unreliable and thicken to a texture you recognize rather than trusting the figure.
- "Cook as for other cream"Slurry the flour with a little cold cream, temper it into the warm cream, then cook at a bare simmer for several minutes. Flour-thickened bases taste pasty if pulled too early; the starch needs real heat to lose its raw edge.
- StrainingThe strain is there to catch flour lumps and the coarsest praline grit. If you want the almond crunch, hold back part of the ground praline and fold it in near the end of churning instead.
- FreezingChill the base thoroughly — overnight is best — before it goes into the machine. The original would have been frozen in a hand-cranked or packed freezer using ice and rock salt.
- Scale and yieldThree quarts of base makes roughly a gallon of finished ice cream once churned. Quartering the whole recipe gives a manageable batch for a home machine.
Burnt almond was a familiar American soda-fountain flavor around the turn of the twentieth century, appearing alongside vanilla, chocolate and pistachio and turning up in sundaes and "college ices." The praline at its heart — nuts cooked directly in caramelized sugar, cooled on a slab and pounded — reached American confectionery through French and German traditions, and the name is often linked to the German gebrannte Mandeln ("burnt almonds"), though the connection is traditional rather than documented; in either case the word describes the sugar rather than any burning of the nut. Flour- and starch-thickened bases were used alongside egg custards in bulk work of this period.