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Covington Cream
½ cup Formosa tea infusion Mix ingredients, and freeze to a mush. glasses. 1/3 cup rum 1 quart cream Serve in frappé Delmonico Ice Cream with Angel Food 2 cups milk ¾ cup sugar Yolks 7 eggs 1/8 teaspoon salt 2½ cups thin cream 1 tablespoon vanilla 1 teaspoon lemon Make custard of milk, sugar, eggs, and salt; cool, strain, and flavor; whip cream, remove whip; there should be two quarts; add to custard, and freeze. Serve plain or with Angel Food.
A tea-and-rum frappé rather than a true ice cream: the mixture is deliberately stopped at the slushy stage and spooned into glasses. Two entries have run together here, so read the first three lines as the whole of Covington Cream.
- Formosa tea infusionFormosa tea means oolong from Taiwan, then a staple of American grocers. Brew it strong -- roughly double the leaf you would use for drinking -- since cream and freezing both blunt tea flavour, and strain it cold.
- Freeze to a mushThis is the hinge. The rum keeps the mixture from setting hard, and it is meant to stay at a coarse, spoonable slush. In a modern machine, churn only until it thickens; in a shallow pan, stir every 20 minutes and stop while it is still loose.
- The cream"Cream" in this book means heavy cream, used liquid and unwhipped. It is not whipped here, so do not fold in air; the texture comes from the ice crystals.
- ProportionsThe cream is not sweetened in the printed text, and no sugar is listed for this recipe. Taste the tea infusion sweetened to your liking before combining -- a frozen mixture always reads less sweet than a cold one.
- Frappe glassesSmall stemmed glasses served with a spoon; the book does not give a size. As written the mixture makes roughly a quart and a half, enough for ten or a dozen small glasses.
- RumThe recipe specifies only 'rum'. A third of a cup in a quart and a half of mixture is a small proportion of alcohol per glass, but enough to keep the mixture soft. Reducing it will let the mixture freeze harder, which changes the dish rather than spoiling it.
- The second entryThe Delmonico custard base that follows should be cooked to 170-180F over hot water and strained; the "remove whip" instruction means whipping the thin cream, lifting off the foam as it forms, and using that foam rather than the liquid beneath.
Frappes of this kind -- a strong flavouring, cream, a spirit, and just enough churning to make crystals -- filled the back pages of American ice-cream chapters in the 1890s and 1900s, when hand-cranked freezers were, by most accounts, common household equipment and a course of something half-frozen was expected at a formal dinner. Formosa oolong is the period marker: Taiwanese tea reached the United States in quantity from the 1870s and was sold by name in grocers' lists. The name Covington is not explained in the book, and like many such titles in the ices chapters of the Boston Cooking-School tradition it was most likely borrowed from a hotel, a club, or a customer rather than a place of origin.