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Bisque Ice Cream
Make custard as for Vanillla Ice Cream II, add one quart cream, one tablespoon vanilla, and one cup hickory nut or English walnut meats finely chopped.
A short instruction that leans entirely on another recipe in the same chapter, and on a hand-cranked freezer the reader was assumed to own. Nearly everything that needs saying is about the base and the freezing.
- Look up the base firstVanilla Ice Cream II is a cooked custard, so make it as directed there, cook it gently until it coats the spoon, then strain and chill it. Take it no further than about 175F; scrambled custard cannot be rescued once the eggs curdle.
- Chill before churningThe custard must be cold, and so must the quart of cream, before the two go into the freezer. A base at room temperature will churn to a coarse, grainy texture no matter how good the ice.
- The vanilla goes in coldA full tablespoon sounds heavy by modern habit but is right for two quarts of base. Add it after the custard has cooled, since alcohol-based extract loses much of its aroma in a hot pan.
- Freezing as writtenThis assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt in roughly three parts ice to one part salt. A modern electric churn works directly; if you have neither, still-freezing in a shallow pan requires beating the mixture two or three times during the first two hours to break up crystals.
- Nuts go in lateStir the chopped nuts in during the last minute of churning, or fold them in as you pack the ice cream away. Added at the start they clog the dasher and settle.
- Hickory nutsNative shagbark hickory nuts were a farmhouse ingredient, gathered rather than bought, and are still sold shelled in some regional markets. Walnuts are the substitution the recipe itself offers. Toasting either at 350F for eight minutes and cooling them fully improves the flavor and keeps them from going soft in the cream.
- RipeningPeriod practice was to repack the frozen can in fresh ice and salt, cover it, and let it stand an hour or two before serving. In a home freezer, two hours in a covered container gives the same firming and lets the nut flavor spread through the base.
- YieldA quart of cream plus the custard makes roughly two quarts finished, depending on how much custard the base recipe yields; about ten to twelve servings.
In American cookery of this period, bisque attached to a frozen dessert meant one studded with something crushed and dry, most often macaroons, ratafias or nuts, rather than anything to do with the shellfish soup of the same name; the shared word is generally traced to the French but the link between the two senses has never been well explained. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats it as a simple variation, one line hung off the standard custard ice cream, which appears to be how the ices chapter is arranged: a full recipe or two and then a set of departures from them. The choice of hickory nut first and English walnut second is at least suggestive, though the page itself carries no date and the book ran through many later editions.