Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Caramel Ice Cream
Caramel Ice Cream
1 quart cream 2 cups milk 1 1/3 cups sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon flour 1/8 teaspoon salt 1½ tablespoons vanilla Prepare same as Vanilla Ice Cream II, using one-half sugar in custard; remaining half caramelize, and add slowly to hot custard. See Caramelization of Sugar, page 586.
This is a shorthand entry that leans on two other pages in the book: the custard base of Vanilla Ice Cream II and the sugar-caramelizing instructions. Here is what the shorthand assumes.
- The base it refers toVanilla Ice Cream II is a cooked custard: the milk is scalded, the flour, salt and sugar are stirred in smooth, cooked over hot water for about 20 minutes, then the beaten egg is added and cooked briefly. Strain, chill, then add the cream and vanilla. In this recipe only half the sugar goes into the custard, the rest being caramelized.
- The hinge: caramel into hot custardMelt the remaining 3/4 cup sugar in a heavy pan until it is deep amber, then add it to the hot custard a little at a time, off the direct heat. Poured in all at once it seizes into a hard lump and cold custard will make it spit; dribbling it in while the custard is hot lets it dissolve.
- How dark to take the sugarThe caramelization page the recipe points to has the sugar melted dry and stirred over heat until it browns to roughly the colour of maple syrup or a shade darker. Caramel flavour comes from that browning, so stopping at pale gold gives a sweet ice cream with little character; taken to the point of smoking it turns harshly bitter.
- The flour is not a mistakeFlour appears in a number of Farmer's frozen custards, thickening the base where more egg yolk might otherwise be used. It helps keep the base from curdling and gives body. Cook the custard long enough that the starch loses its raw taste.
- One egg onlyMany modern caramel ice creams are built on six or eight yolks. This one uses a single whole egg, so expect a less custardy result than a French-style base, closer to old-fashioned churned cream.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. In a modern machine, chill the finished base thoroughly, ideally overnight, before churning; a warm base will not freeze properly.
- YieldAt least 1 1/2 quarts, probably closer to 2 once churned, so 10 to 12 servings. Freezer cans were customarily filled only about two-thirds, so use a machine with at least 2 quarts of capacity.
- RipeningNineteenth-century practice was to repack the frozen can in ice and salt and let it stand an hour or two. The modern equivalent is a few hours in the freezer, which firms the texture and lets the caramel flavor round out.
Caramel ice cream sits among a run of variations in Fannie Farmer's ices chapter, many of them written as a departure from a numbered vanilla base rather than as standalone recipes. That structure suggests how the book was meant to be used: learn the custard as a technique first, then vary it, with the cross-reference to "Caramelization of Sugar" pointing to a separate treatment of what heat does to sugar. Burnt sugar as a flavouring long predates the ice cream; it was a common household colouring and flavouring for soups, gravies and cakes through the nineteenth century, often kept as a bottled "browning" on the shelf. By the 1896 first edition ice cream had become a realistic middle-class dish thanks to cheap manufactured ice and the crank freezer, though the labour of cracking ice and packing salt still made it company food.