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Chocolate Ice Cream (Two quarts sweet cream quarts)
Two quarts sweet cream, 3 quarts sweet milk, 1 pound American Soluble Fountain Cocoa, 1 teaspoonful table salt, 4 whipped eggs, 1 ounce vanilla extract, 5 pounds sugar. Dissolve the soluble cocoa in i pint hot milk and when a smooth paste add to balance of ingredients, and let it stand in feeezer well iced (no salt) until ice cold, then salt ice and freeze. N.B.: Three ounces French gelatin may be substituted for the eggs.
A soda-fountain batch recipe, written for a hand-cranked or brine-jacketed freezer holding the better part of two gallons. Several of its assumptions no longer hold in a domestic kitchen.
- The eggs are never cookedFour whipped eggs go straight into a cold dairy mix that is chilled, salted down and frozen. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either — it simply preserves whatever is present. For an egg-enriched ice cream, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base.
- ScaleTwo quarts cream plus three quarts milk, with five pounds of sugar and a pound of cocoa, yields roughly two gallons of finished ice cream. Fountain trade recipes were written for a day's counter sales, not a household.
- "Soluble" cocoaIn period trade usage "soluble" generally signalled a cocoa treated with alkali so that it would disperse in liquid rather than lump; the precise processing of this particular brand is not recorded here. Ordinary natural cocoa is not a straight substitute: it is more acidic, lighter in colour and disperses less readily.
- The freezer, and the salt"Let it stand in freezer well iced (no salt)" means packing plain ice around the can to chill the mix without starting it setting; salt is added to the ice only when you are ready to freeze, because salt drops the brine below 32F and the mix begins to seize at once. This staged chilling has no equivalent in a modern countertop machine.
- French gelatinGelatin was used in trade work as an alternative to eggs, giving body and slowing melt. Gelatin strength varies by grade and form, so the three-ounce figure cannot be transferred directly to a modern product.
- Sugar loadFive pounds of sugar to five quarts of dairy is high even for the period, and deliberately so — sugar depresses the freezing point and kept fountain ice cream scoopable out of a brine cabinet rather than freezing to a brick.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were as much trade literature as cookery, and this one carries the marks of it: the cocoa is named by brand, the quantities are a day's production, and the equipment assumed is a salt-and-ice freezer can rather than anything a housekeeper owned. Chocolate was one of the three standing fountain flavours alongside vanilla and strawberry, and the arrival of alkalised, readily dispersible cocoa in the second half of the nineteenth century is what made a smooth chocolate ice cream practical at volume: a cocoa that would wet properly in cold milk. The note offering gelatin in place of eggs appears to reflect a broader shift in the trade toward stabilisers, which gave a firmer, slower-melting product that survived a warm counter better than a plain custard.