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French Chocolate Ice Cream
Four quarts of cream, 10 ounces of chocolate, 2 pounds and 6 ounces of sugar, vanilla flavor, 12 egg yolks. Slowly melt the chocolate in the boiler, adding sugar and cream gradually, constantly stirring until it has reached the boiling point; then add the yolks in the same manner as for vanilla cream, strain and cool, then add vanilla flavor and freeze.
This is a soda-fountain batch formula, written for a hand-cranked freezer and scaled to fill a fountain tub. Everything works at a quarter of the quantity in a domestic machine.
- Scale it downFour quarts of cream plus sugar and yolks yields well over a gallon of finished ice cream. A quarter batch — 1 quart cream, 2 1/2 oz chocolate, 9 1/2 oz sugar, 3 yolks — fits a 1 1/2 to 2 quart machine with room for expansion.
- "The boiler"Almost certainly a double boiler or jacketed kettle rather than a pot over direct heat. Chocolate scorches on direct heat, and a gentle water bath also helps keep the yolks from scrambling later.
- The chocolateThe chocolate meant here was unsweetened block chocolate, ground for melting. Use plain unsweetened baking chocolate; if you substitute a 70% bar, cut the sugar by roughly 2 ounces per 10 ounces of chocolate.
- The sugar looks extremeTwo pounds six ounces to four quarts works out to roughly a fifth of the mix by weight, sweeter than a typical modern custard base. Sugar depresses the freezing point, which is what kept ice cream scoopable in a salt-and-ice tub. In a modern freezer you can drop it by a fifth without the texture suffering.
- "Reached the boiling point"Take it to a bare simmer only, and add the yolks off the boil, tempering them with a ladle of the hot cream first, then stirring them back into the pot. Return to 175-180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; much above that and the eggs begin to curdle, which may be one reason the recipe calls for straining. The recipe refers you to its own vanilla cream method, which is not reproduced here.
- Chill before freezing"Strain and cool" is doing real work. Cool the custard over ice, then hold it in the refrigerator several hours or overnight; an aged, thoroughly cold base churns faster and finer.
- Vanilla lastExtract is added after cooling because the aromatics boil off. Roughly 2 tablespoons for the full batch, 1 1/2 teaspoons for a quart.
- If you use a crank freezerThree parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed around the can, and turn steadily. Let the finished cream ripen an hour packed in ice and salt before serving.
Manuals like this one were trade books, written for a professional kitchen rather than the home cook, which is why the quantities begin at four quarts and the instructions assume you already know how vanilla cream is made. "French" in American ice cream usage means only that the base is a cooked egg-yolk custard, as opposed to the plain "Philadelphia" style of sweetened cream frozen without eggs — a distinction still used in the trade today. The heavy sugar and the egg yolks both served the working conditions: yolk lecithin emulsified the mix so it stayed smooth through a day in the tub, and sugar kept it soft enough to dip. The chocolate was unsweetened, which is why the recipe pairs ten ounces of it with well over two pounds of sugar.