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Burnt Almond Ice Cream
It is made same as Caramel Ice Cream, with the addition of one cup finely chopped blanched almonds.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the caramel ice cream recipe in hand a few pages earlier. Everything that needs attention here is in the almonds and in the freezing.
- "Burnt" means caramel, not scorchedThe name comes from the burnt-sugar base, not from over-toasting the nuts. Cook the sugar for the caramel to a deep amber, well past pale gold, or the flavour will be faint once it is diluted with dairy and frozen; freezing dulls caramel.
- Blanching the almondsPour boiling water over shelled almonds, let them stand a minute, drain, and pinch the skins off. Blanched almonds sold ready-skinned work equally well, though they can taste flat; toast them lightly and cool them fully before chopping.
- Chop, do not grindTake "finely chopped" as knife-cut, roughly rice-grain size, not reduced to meal. A food processor will take them to meal in seconds and the cream turns grey and pasty. One cup of chopped almonds is roughly 4 to 5 oz.
- When to add the nutsThe original does not say. Fold them in when the ice cream is churned to soft-serve thickness rather than stirring them into the liquid base, or they sink and pack into the bottom of the can.
- Freezing gearFarmer specifies a hand-crank freezer packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt; churning typically ran twenty to thirty minutes. A modern churn will serve; if the base includes an egg custard, cook it to 170-175F and chill it thoroughly overnight before churning.
- RipeningPeriod practice was to draw the dasher, repack in fresh ice and salt, and let the cream stand an hour or two to firm and mellow. The freezer equivalent is two to four hours in a shallow covered container.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; a base of this kind will make on the order of a quart or more, enough for six to eight.
Burnt almond was a staple flavour of American soda fountains and confectioners' shops around the turn of the twentieth century; the pairing of caramelized sugar with almonds is far older and runs back through European confectionery to praline and to the German gebrannte Mandeln sold at fairs. Its appearance here as a single sentence tells you something about how Fannie Farmer's book is built: the Ices and Ice Creams chapter works outward from a handful of base recipes, and dozens of "new" flavours are just one added ingredient and a cross-reference.