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Chocolate Ice Cream (One can American Evaporated)
One can American Evaporated Cream, 10 ounces water, 1 tablespoonful vanilla chocolate cooked in a half cupful water, ¾ cup of sugar, 25 drops American Fine Vanilla Extract. This quantity doubles in freezing, making 48 ounces, or 3 pints, costing per gallon 60 cents.
This is a trade formula written for a fountain operator with a crank freezer and a price list, not for a home cook. The measurements assume a specific can and a specific kind of chocolate, both of which need translating.
- "Evaporated cream"This is unsweetened evaporated milk, sold under that older trade name in the period. Can sizes varied, and the recipe's own arithmetic (a 24 oz base doubling to 48 oz) implies a can nearer 10 oz than the 16 oz tall can, so treat the size as uncertain. Today's standard can is 12 fl oz; the safest course is to work to the total volume the recipe implies.
- "Vanilla chocolate"A period term for sweetened eating chocolate flavoured with vanilla, not a liquid flavouring. A tablespoon of grated or finely chopped chocolate is roughly a third of an ounce; use semisweet or bittersweet to that measure. Unsweetened baking chocolate will read as harsh here, since the recipe's sugar is calculated for a sweetened bar.
- Cooking the chocolateMelt the chocolate in the half cup of water and let it come to a simmer for a minute or two, stirring, so the cocoa solids hydrate. Skipping this leaves the finished ice cream grainy and pale in flavour. Dissolve the sugar into the hot chocolate liquid, then stir into the diluted evaporated milk.
- 25 drops of extractAbout a quarter teaspoon. The chocolate was itself vanilla-scented, which may be why the added extract is so small a quantity.
- Chill before churningThe mixture goes into the freezer warm as written, which was tolerable with ice and salt and half an hour of cranking. In a modern machine, refrigerate the base to 40F or below first, or the dasher will simply whip warm liquid and the texture will suffer.
- "Doubles in freezing"That is 100 percent overrun, which is what the book claims rather than what a hand-cranked can can be relied on to deliver. A modern domestic churn gives perhaps 25 to 40 percent, so expect closer to 1 quart than 3 pints, denser and firmer than the original describes.
- No eggs, no cooking of a custardNo eggs, no custard -- the body comes from the concentrated milk solids in the can rather than from egg yolk. The term "Philadelphia-style" is sometimes used for eggless ice creams, though it properly describes an uncooked cream base. An eggless mix of this sort tends to freeze hard and melt quickly; serve it within a day or two, straight from a shallow container.
- The costingSixty cents a gallon was the selling point, not a note for the cook. Ignore it except as a reminder that the whole formula exists to hit a price.
Books like this one appear to have been published by and for the soda-fountain trade in the first decades of the twentieth century, when a druggist's fountain was expected to turn out ice cream, phosphates and sundaes at a known cost per gallon. Evaporated milk, canned and shelf-stable, made that possible: a fountain in a town without reliable cream delivery could still produce a passable ice cream from tinned stock and a bag of sugar, and manufacturers of the cans seem to have had every reason to circulate recipe pamphlets proving it. The brand name repeated in the ingredient list is the tell, and the confident line about cost per gallon reads as if aimed at a proprietor weighing costs. "Vanilla chocolate" as a shop term for sweetened, vanilla-scented eating chocolate was still current then and has since disappeared, which is why the recipe reads oddly today.