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Frozen Chocolate with Whipped Cream
2 squares unsweetened chocolate 1 cup sugar 3 cups rich milk Few grains salt 1 cup boiling water Scald milk. Melt chocolate in small saucepan placed over hot water, add one-half the sugar, salt, and gradually boiling water. Boil five minutes, add to scalded milk with remaining sugar. Cool, freeze, and serve in glasses. Garnish with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla. 2 cups water 1 cup sugar Juice 3 lemons Pineapple Frappé 2 cups ice-water 1 can grated pineapple or 1 pineapple shredded Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar fifteen minutes; add pineapple and lemon juice; cool, strain, add ice-water, and freeze to a mush, using equal parts ice and salt. If fresh fruit is used, more sugar will be required. 2 cups water 2 cups sugar
Two separate recipes have run together here: a frozen chocolate and a pineapple frappé, with the first line of a third recipe stranded at the end. Treat them as three items, not one.
- Squares of chocolateA square of unsweetened chocolate is one ounce, so this calls for 2 oz. Modern bars are often scored into half-ounce pieces or sold in 4 oz blocks — weigh rather than count.
- Rich milkMilk in 1896 came unhomogenized with the cream still in it. Whole milk with about a quarter of it replaced by light cream gives the intended body; skim milk will freeze hard and icy.
- The five-minute boilThis is the hinge of the chocolate recipe. Cooking the chocolate, sugar and boiling water together into a syrup dissolves the sugar fully and cooks the raw edge off the cocoa solids. Stir it, keep it at a bare boil, and do not skip the step or the finished ice tastes chalky.
- FreezingBoth recipes assume a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first — several hours or overnight — then churn. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes.
- Equal parts ice and saltThe usual proportion for ice cream was three parts ice to one of salt; the frappé calls for equal parts, a colder brine. Either way the mixture is taken only to 'a mush', which is the point of a frappé, and it should be served spoonable, not solid.
- A can of grated pineappleCanned crushed pineapple is the nearest thing today; period cans were not of a standard size, so go by volume. The note that fresh fruit needs more sugar still holds if the canned fruit is packed in syrup.
- The stray line"2 cups water 2 cups sugar" at the end belongs to whatever recipe followed in the book. Ignore it.
- YieldThe frozen chocolate works out at something over a quart of mixture; the frappé rather more.
Frozen chocolate sits in the odd space between drink and dessert that late Victorian cooks were happy to occupy: it is essentially a cup of chocolate, scalded and syruped as if for the breakfast table, then frozen and served in a glass with cream on top. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a chapter over to frozen desserts, and a household with an ice-box already had the raw material at hand — commercial ice harvesting and delivery were at their height in the 1890s, and the same block that kept the milk cold could be cracked up with rock salt to work a hand freezer. Frappé, from the French for 'struck' or 'iced,' meant a water ice frozen only to a coarse slush, and such things were often served midway through a long dinner as much to reset the palate as to please the sweet tooth. The canned grated pineapple in the second recipe is worth noticing: tinned tropical fruit in a Boston kitchen in the 1890s was a genuinely modern convenience.