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Praline Ice Cream
3 pints cream. 1 1/3 cups sugar. 1 cup Jordan almonds 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon vanilla Blanch almonds cut in pieces crosswise, and bake in a shallow pan until well browned, shaking pan frequently; then finely chop. Caramelize one-half of the sugar, and add slowly to two cups of the cream scalded. As soon as sugar is melted, add nuts, remaining sugar, and salt. Cool, add remaining cream, and freeze. A few grains salt is always an improvement to any ice cream mixture.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no custard — carrying its flavour from burnt sugar and toasted almonds. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the method first.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient column names only almonds, salt and vanilla, yet the method calls for sugar and cream. Fannie Farmer's ice creams in this section generally run to a quart of thin cream and about a cup of sugar; treat those as a starting point rather than a transcription of the original, which does not state them.
- Jordan almondsThese are large, flat Spanish almonds sold raw in the shell or blanched — not the pastel candy-coated sweets the name now brings to mind. Any good raw almond will do.
- Toasting"Bake in a shallow pan until well browned" is all the original says; no temperature or time is given. A moderate oven, around 350F for 10-15 minutes with frequent shaking, will do it. They colour fast at the end and turn bitter if pushed; pull them when they smell nutty and look deep gold.
- The caramel is the hingeMelt half the sugar in a heavy pan until it is a deep amber, then add it slowly to the scalded cream, as the recipe directs. Hot caramel meeting cream boils up violently, and adding it all at once will seize the sugar into a solid lump.
- Vanilla goes in coldAdd the tablespoon of vanilla after the mixture has cooled, along with the remaining cream. Extract added to scalding cream loses much of its aroma to the steam.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly — ideally overnight — before churning, then ripen it in the freezer for a few hours to firm.
- Nut textureChopped nuts stirred into the base soften as they sit in the cream. If you want them crisp, hold back half and fold them in during the last minute of churning.
- YieldWith a quart of cream this makes roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Praline in the French sense means almonds cooked in caramelised sugar, a confection generally traced to the kitchen of the seventeenth-century Maréchal du Plessis-Praslin, who is often said to have given it his name; the pecan-and-cream patty sold in New Orleans is a later American branch of the same family. Farmer's version splits the difference: the sugar is caramelised for colour and bitterness, the almonds toasted separately, and the two carried in cream rather than set as candy. Ice creams occupy a long chapter in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, by which time the hand-crank freezer had become an ordinary piece of household equipment, and a school teaching systematic cookery treated frozen desserts as a set of variations on a base — vanilla, then coffee, then caramel, then nut — rather than as occasional luxuries.