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Delmonico Ice Cream
This is a rich ice cream, allowing 8 egg yolks to 1 quart of sweet cream, made properly it should be and I vanilla bean to every 2 quarts, and if frozen in a French freezer, or at least after the French style. This cream, like all others of this sort, is especially adaptable for molding.
This is a formula rather than a set of instructions — a fountain man's note on proportions, assuming he already knew how to build a custard and pack a freezer. The text as printed is garbled in the middle line, so read it as: 8 egg yolks per quart of cream, one vanilla bean per 2 quarts.
- The hinge: cook the custard, do not scramble itThe hinge: cook the custard, do not scramble it. Eight yolks to the quart is a very high yolk load that sets fast. Note that the book attaches "the French style" to the freezer rather than to the base, so the cooked custard is an inference from the yolk count; hold the mixture over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon (about 170-175F), then strain and chill it thoroughly before freezing.
- Sugar is not givenThe original omits it entirely. A rich custard base of this kind is usually sweetened somewhere in the range of 6-8 oz sugar per quart of cream, but that is a modern working guide; treat any figure as your own decision, not the book's.
- "Sweet cream"Fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour or cultured cream also kept in a dairy. Use heavy cream; a base of all cream and no milk will be dense, and splitting it half cream, half whole milk is one way to lighten it without losing the character.
- A French freezerA hand-cranked or motorised churn with a rotating dasher and an ice-and-salt jacket, as opposed to a still-frozen mold. Any modern churn with a paddle does the same job; the point is continuous agitation for a fine grain.
- The vanilla beanSplit one bean per 2 quarts, scrape the seeds into the cream and steep the pod in the hot custard for 20-30 minutes, then remove it. Extract can substitute at about 1 tablespoon per 2 quarts, added after cooling.
- MoldingThe book says only that creams of this sort are "especially adaptable for molding"; the richness of the base is presumably part of why. Pack the churned cream into a chilled mold, press out air pockets, cover, and ripen in the freezer several hours before turning out.
- YieldOne quart of cream plus eight yolks and sugar churns to roughly 1.5 quarts, or about 10 modest fountain servings. This is very rich; small portions are correct.
The name borrows the prestige of Delmonico's, the New York restaurant that from the 1830s onward was American shorthand for the top of the table, much as "Delmonico steak" still is. Soda fountain and confectioners' manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely attached restaurant and hotel names to their richest formulas, and an eight-yolk custard frozen in a French freezer was about as rich as a fountain could go — the French style, meaning a cooked egg custard base rather than the plain sweetened cream of "Philadelphia" ice cream, marked it out from the everyday product sold by the dish.