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Brown Bread Ice Cream
3 pints cream 1¼ cups dried brown bread crumbs ½ cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt Soak crumbs in one quart cream, let stand fifteen minutes, rub through sieve, add sugar, salt, and remaining cream ; then freeze.
An uncooked Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no custard — where the flavor comes entirely from steamed brown bread. Two numbers in the text have been mangled in transcription; read them as 1¼ cups crumbs and ¼ teaspoon salt.
- The bread is the whole pointThe brown bread here is almost certainly the Boston kind: the steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat sweetened with molasses, though the recipe says only "brown bread." Dry slices in a low oven (about 250F) until brittle, then crumb them. Ordinary whole-wheat sandwich bread gives a flat, toasty result with none of the molasses depth.
- Dried, not fresh, crumbsFresh crumbs turn to paste and will not sieve. Drying also concentrates the flavor, which is why 1¼ cups is enough to season three pints of cream.
- "Rub through sieve"After soaking, press the softened crumbs through a medium sieve with the back of a spoon so the solids pass through as a fine purée. The aim is a speckled, faintly gritty cream, not chunks of soggy bread. A few brief pulses in a blender does the same work.
- Cream, then and nowCream was not standardised then; cookbooks of the period distinguish a thin cream (perhaps 18-20% fat) from a heavy one. Modern heavy cream at 36% freezes very rich and dense; a mix of two parts heavy cream to one part whole milk is probably nearer the thinner cream many readers would have had.
- FreezingThe original means a hand-crank freezer packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first — at least four hours, ideally overnight — then churn 20-25 minutes and ripen in the freezer for two hours before serving.
- Sugar is low by modern standardsHalf a cup for three pints of cream reads as barely sweet and freezes hard. Up to ¾ cup, or a couple of tablespoons of molasses in place of some of it, both sweetens and keeps the texture softer.
- YieldRoughly two quarts once churned, depending on how much air it takes up; figure eight to twelve servings. Halve it comfortably for a standard 1½-quart machine.
Brown bread ice cream belongs to a small family of Victorian and Edwardian frozen creams built on stale baked goods — brown bread, macaroons, gingerbread — a thrifty and genuinely good use for a loaf past its prime. The bread in question is generally taken to be the New England sort, the steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf sweetened with molasses that traditionally accompanied the region's Saturday supper of baked beans; molasses was cheap in a port city that had spent two centuries trading with the West Indies. Fannie Farmer's 1896 volume gives dozens of ices in this compressed telegraphic style, assuming a household with a hand-crank freezer, a supply of ice from the icehouse or the iceman, and rock salt on hand. The version is Philadelphia-style, meaning cream frozen without a cooked egg custard; the eggless base lets the malty, faintly sour bread flavor come through undiluted.