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Ice Cream Sandwiches
These have become very popular, and are made by spreading a thin porof ice cream between two tion vanilla sugar wafers, using ice cream sandwich mold.
Barely a recipe, more a fountain man's note on assembly — but the details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether the thing holds together.
- The garbled lineThe typesetting has scrambled: it should read "spreading a thin portion of ice cream between two vanilla sugar wafers." The stray "tion" belongs to "portion."
- The moldAn ice cream sandwich mold was a shallow metal form sized to the wafer, used to press the ice cream into a slab of even thickness; period examples vary in construction. A square or rectangular cookie cutter set on a shallow tray does the same work; so does slicing a brick of firm ice cream with a warmed knife.
- Sugar wafersNot the modern layered, cream-filled sugar wafer. What is meant is a thin, crisp, flat vanilla wafer, close to a Nilla wafer or a sugar-cookie snap.
- Ice cream temperatureThe hinge of the whole thing. Ice cream soft enough to spread will melt straight into the wafer and turn it limp. Work with ice cream tempered just enough to cut, assemble fast, then return the finished sandwiches to the freezer for at least an hour to firm.
- ThicknessThe recipe says only "thin." About half an inch works well in practice: thick enough to taste, thin enough that the sandwich does not squirt out the sides at the first bite.
- Holding and wrappingThe original assumes immediate sale over a counter. For home use, wrap each sandwich in parchment or wax paper before freezing; unwrapped, the wafers pick up freezer odors and go soft within a day.
- YieldA quart of ice cream cut half an inch thick fills about ten to twelve sandwiches, depending on wafer size.
The soda fountain of the early 1900s ran on a small vocabulary of components — syrups, wafers, brick ice cream — recombined endlessly, and the ice cream sandwich is one of the plainest recombinations in the book: two things already on the shelf, pressed together in a purpose-made mold. The form is usually traced to street vendors in New York around the turn of the century, hawking penny sandwiches from pushcarts, and by the time this book records it the trade had adopted it as something "very popular" enough to need no argument. Note what the entry actually is: a note to the dispenser rather than to a cook, assuming he already has hard ice cream, a case of wafers, and the correct piece of tinware within arm's reach.