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Grape Ice Cream
Boil 1 pint of good sweet cream in a farina boiler, adding ¾ pound granulated sugar, and stir until dissolved. Then cool, add 1 pint 1 pint more of good sweet cream. Freeze in freezer.
A plain sweet-cream base written for a soda fountain, where flavoring was added from the syrup rail rather than built into the recipe. A few things need translating before it works in a home kitchen.
- The missing grapeAs printed, nothing in the method is grape. The flavoring is simply absent: a fountain operator would have had grape syrup or juice on stock to stir in before freezing, but no quantity is given here, so add it to taste. Add it cold to the cooled base, not to the hot cream.
- Acid and creamGrape juice is acidic enough to curdle scalded cream if it goes in warm or all at once. Chill the base thoroughly first, then whisk the juice in slowly.
- Farina boilerA double boiler. The cream is heated over water so it never scorches or catches on the bottom; a heavy saucepan over low heat with constant stirring does the same job.
- "Boil"Cream held at a true rolling boil will reduce and can break, so take the instruction loosely: heat only until the sugar is dissolved and steam rises, rather than to a full rolling boil.
- Three-quarters of a pound of sugarRoughly 1⅔ cups granulated. That is heavy by modern standards for a quart of cream, but fountain ices were deliberately sweet, and the sugar also keeps the frozen texture soft. If you cut it, expect a harder, icier result.
- The doubled phrase"add 1 pint 1 pint more" is a compositor's error. One pint is scalded with the sugar, one pint of cold cream is added afterward, for two pints total.
- Freeze in freezerThis means a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, churned until stiff. A modern ice cream machine gives the same result; a still-frozen pan will not, since there is no egg or stabilizer to fight ice crystals.
- YieldAbout a quart and a bit before churning, closer to a generous quart and a half after. Six to eight fountain servings.
Soda fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the cook at home, which is why the base is given bare and the flavoring assumed. Grape was one of the standard fountain flavors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, riding on the commercial availability of unfermented Concord grape juice, a product usually traced to Thomas Welch and his family at Vineland, New Jersey, and promoted in temperance circles as a wine substitute. Bottled grape syrup was a fountain fixture around the turn of the century, poured for phosphates, sodas and ices alike, so a shop that stocked it could turn the same sweet cream base into several flavors without keeping a separate recipe for each.