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Vanilla Ice Cream Croquettes
Shape Vanilla Ice Cream in individual moulds, roll in macaroon dust made by pounding and sifting dry macaroons. Chocolate Ice Cream I 1 quart thin cream 1 cup sugar Few grains salt 1½ squares unsweetened chocolate or 1 tablespoon vanilla 1/4 cup prepared cocoa Melt chocolate, and dilute with hot water to pour easily, add to cream; then add sugar, salt, and flavoring, and freeze.
Two things run together here: a serving trick for vanilla ice cream, and a Philadelphia-style chocolate ice cream with no eggs and no cooking. The typography of the original has scrambled the chocolate ingredient list, so read it carefully before shopping.
- The garbled ingredient listAs printed, the chocolate options and the flavoring have run together. It reads as 1 quart thin cream, 1 cup sugar, a few grains of salt, 1 tablespoon vanilla, and either 1½ squares unsweetened chocolate or ¼ cup prepared cocoa. Do not use both chocolate and cocoa.
- Squares of chocolateA square is 1 ounce, so 1½ squares is 1½ oz unsweetened baking chocolate. "Prepared cocoa" at this date appears to mean plain cocoa powder sold ready for use rather than a sweetened drinking mix; unsweetened natural cocoa is the closest match.
- Thin creamRoughly 18 to 20 percent butterfat. No single modern product matches it: half-and-half (about 10 to 18 percent) is the nearest, or blend roughly equal parts whole milk and heavy cream. Straight 36 percent heavy cream is much richer than intended and can churn grainy.
- Freezing"Freeze" means a crank freezer packed with one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice, churned until stiff. Any modern ice cream machine does the same job; chill the mixture thoroughly first, since this base is never cooked and goes in at room temperature otherwise.
- Diluting the chocolateMelted unsweetened chocolate seizes into grains when it hits cold cream. The instruction to thin it with hot water first is the hinge of the recipe; add the water a spoonful at a time until it pours smoothly, then temper it with a little of the cream before combining.
- Macaroon dustThe macaroons meant here are the crisp almond sort, not French macarons; coconut macaroons also existed at the date, but almond is what is wanted. Dry amaretti, crushed and sifted, give a similar texture. Sift out the coarse crumbs so the coating adheres evenly.
- Shaping the croquettesWork fast and cold. Mould or scoop the ice cream into cork-shaped cylinders, freeze them hard on a chilled tray, then roll in the crumbs at the last moment and return to the freezer until service, or the coating goes soft.
- YieldThe chocolate ice cream makes about 1½ quarts, or eight to ten servings. Reckon two croquettes per person for the vanilla.
Moulded and coated ice creams were a mark of ambition in the American dining room of the 1890s and 1900s, and the croquette is the plainest of them: dessert dressed in the shape of a savory dish, the macaroon dust standing in for breadcrumbs. Fannie Farmer's book is full of this sort of visual pun. The chocolate ice cream that follows is Philadelphia-style, meaning cream, sugar and flavoring frozen without a cooked custard base, a category said to have been widely favored in American home ice cream making because it required no eggs and no watching a double boiler. The salt-and-ice freezer that made it possible had been a fixture of the well-equipped kitchen since the middle of the nineteenth century, and by Farmer's day it was cheap enough that a cooking school could presume a good many readers had one.