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Formulas for Making Ice Creams
No. 1.
1 quart heavy Cream, $0.35; ½ pound Sugar, .0234; 10 drops American Double Vanilla Extract, 0 .004. $0.38 Mix and freeze. This will swell in freezing, and produce 3 quarts, costing 38 cents, or per gallon 50 cents.
A soda-fountain costing formula rather than a domestic recipe: three ingredients, a price for each, and a yield calculated on the overrun a commercial brine freezer could achieve. The proportions still work, but the arithmetic at the end will not.
- The yield is a machine's yieldOne quart of cream plus sugar cannot become three quarts in a domestic churn. Tripling the volume implies an overrun of something like 150 to 200 per cent, more than a batch freezer of the period would usually be pushed to, so the printed yield is probably optimistic. A home ice cream maker gives perhaps 25 to 50 per cent overrun, so expect roughly 1¼ to 1½ quarts of finished ice cream.
- Sugar by weightHalf a pound of granulated sugar is about 1⅛ cups. At that rate sugar is roughly a fifth of the finished mix by weight, which is on the sweet side of modern practice but keeps the texture soft rather than icy.
- "American Double Vanilla Extract"A double-strength flavouring extract of the sort sold to the fountain trade rather than a household bottle. Ten drops of it is roughly ⅛ teaspoon; modern recipes using ordinary single-strength vanilla extract typically call for 1 to 2 teaspoons for this quantity.
- Heavy cream then and nowCream of this period was unhomogenised and heavy cream generally ran around 35 to 40 per cent butterfat, close to today's heavy whipping cream. Modern cream carrying gums or carrageenan may hold air somewhat better.
- No cooking, no eggsThis is what the trade called a Philadelphia-style mix: nothing is heated and nothing is custard. Dissolve the sugar fully in the cold cream before freezing or it will grit. Use pasteurised cream.
- HardeningMix and freeze leaves out the second stage the fountain took for granted. Straight from the churn this is soft-serve; pack it and hold it at about 0F for four hours or more before scooping.
- The pricesThirty-five cents a quart for cream and roughly a nickel a pound for sugar are consistent with the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. They are there so the proprietor could price a dish, not as a shopping guide.
Trade manuals like this one were written for the man behind the counter, not the cook at home, which is why every line carries a price. The American soda fountain grew out of the pharmacy: druggists dispensed carbonated water for its supposed health value, added flavouring syrups to sell more of it, and by the 1890s were running full ice cream and soda counters as the profitable front of the shop. Formula No. 1 is the plainest thing in such a book, the base against which chocolate, fruit and nut variations were costed. Its uncooked cream-and-sugar composition is what the trade called Philadelphia ice cream, generally traced to that city's nineteenth-century confectioners and distinguished from the egg-thickened French or custard style; the appeal to a fountain operator was that it needed no cooking, no cooling and no eggs to spoil in warm weather.