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German Ice Cream
Mix one and one-fourth cups sugar, one tablespoon flour, and one-fourth teaspoon salt. Add two eggs slightly beaten and two cups scalded milk. Cook over hot water until mixture thickens, then add two squares melted chocolate, and cool. Add three cups cream and one tablespoon vanilla. Strain and freeze. Just before serving add three cups zweiback dried and broken in small pieces.
Frozen Orange Soufflé 1½ cups orange juice 1½ teaspoons granulated gelatine 1½ cups sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice Yolks 5 eggs 3 tablespoons boiling water 2½ cups cream Candied orange peel Pistachio nuts Mix fruit juice, sugar, and yolks of eggs. Cook over boiling water until mixture thickens; then add gelatine dissolved in boiling water. Cool, freeze to a mush, add whip from cream, and continue freezing. Mould, and serve garnished with candied orange peel and pistachio nuts.
Two frozen desserts run together on one page: a chocolate custard ice cream folded with zwieback, and a still-frozen orange soufflé. Both were written for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, and both assume a cook who knows what a cooked custard should look like.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard 1-oz square of the period. Semisweet or chips will throw the sugar balance off; use unsweetened.
- ZwiebackA twice-baked, lightly sweet rusk, still sold in the baby-food aisle in some markets and in German bakeries. Dry the pieces further in a 300F oven if they are at all soft, or they will turn to paste in the cream.
- Cook over hot water, not over the flameThe custard is set in a double boiler because it is thickened by egg, not by the flour, which is there mainly as insurance. Pull it when it coats a spoon, around 175-180F; hotter and it curdles, and no amount of straining will make it smooth again.
- Cool it properly"Cool" here means thoroughly cold, and chilling in the refrigerator first helps. A warm base churns into coarse ice in any machine, and in an ice-and-salt freezer it will take far longer to set.
- FreezeIn a modern churn this is a straightforward custard base; times vary by machine, roughly 20-40 minutes. Fold the zwieback in by hand at the very end as directed, so it stays in distinct pieces; the yield is somewhere near 2 quarts.
- "Add whip from cream"In this book you whip cream, skim the stiff froth off the top as it forms, and use that froth alone. Practically, whip 2½ cups of cream to soft peaks and fold in the whole amount.
- Frozen to a mushChill or freeze only until slushy, fold in the cream, then pack into a mould and freeze firm, four hours or more. The recipe's "continue freezing" leaves it open whether the mush stage was made in the crank freezer.
- GelatineOne and a half teaspoons of granulated gelatine is about two-thirds of a modern envelope. Dissolve it in the 3 tablespoons of boiling water and stir it into the hot custard so it disperses; added to a cold mixture it will string.
- Acid and yolksOrange and lemon juice with egg yolk curdles readily. Keep the water at a bare boil and stir constantly, and strain the custard before cooling if it looks at all grainy.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book came out in 1896, when ice cream at home meant a wooden bucket, a tin can, cracked ice and coarse rock salt, and twenty minutes of cranking; commercial ice was cheap and widely delivered in northern cities, which is why a book aimed at ordinary households could carry a whole chapter of ices. "German ice cream" is a period label rather than a documented import, and like a good many nineteenth-century American dish names it points at an ingredient rather than a place: zwieback, from the German for "twice-baked," was familiar in the United States largely through German bakeries and immigrant households. The chocolate base itself is a straightforward cooked custard, what the trade called French ice cream to distinguish it from the plain uncooked Philadelphia style of cream, sugar and flavouring. The orange soufflé beside it belongs to the other half of the chapter, the still-frozen mousses and parfaits that needed no churn at all and could be packed in a mould and buried in ice until dinner.