Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Macaroon Ice Cream
Macaroon Ice Cream
1 quart cream 1 cup macaroons ¾ cup sugar 1 tablespoon vanilla Dry, pound, and measure macaroons; add to cream, sugar, and vanilla, then freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream, meaning no eggs and no cooking: cream, sugar, flavoring, and crushed almond macaroons churned straight from the bowl. The only real technique is in the macaroons.
- Sugar quantityThe sugar reads as 3/4 cup. Dissolve it fully in the cream before churning or the finished ice cream will feel gritty.
- What "macaroons" means hereNot coconut macaroons and not French macarons. Fannie Farmer means the crisp almond macaroon of the period ", made with almond paste and egg white. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf.
- Dry, pound, and measureThe macaroons are dried until brittle in a low oven, then crushed and measured after crushing, not before. Damp macaroons dissolve into the cream and you lose the texture entirely.
- Cream"Cream" in 1896 was not a standardised product, and the book elsewhere distinguishes thin from thick cream, so this may have been lighter than modern heavy cream. Heavy cream alone freezes very rich and dense; a mix of three parts heavy cream to one part whole milk churns lighter without thinning the flavor.
- VanillaA full tablespoon is more than most modern recipes use.
- FreezingThe original assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt. In an electric machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first, churn until it holds soft peaks, then harden in the freezer for two to three hours.
- When to add the crumbsStirring the crumbs in at the start softens them as written. For crisper bits, hold half back and add them during the last minute of churning.
- YieldA quart of cream makes somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts churned depending on how much air the machine works in, or roughly eight to ten servings.
The recipe belongs to the Philadelphia school of ice cream, which flavors sweetened raw cream directly rather than building a cooked egg custard. The section it sits in, in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, treats ices and ice creams as an ordinary domestic accomplishment rather than a confectioner's specialty, which reflects how far the hand-crank freezer had spread through middle-class kitchens by the end of the century.