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Vanilla Ice Cream II
2 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 quart thin cream 2 tablespoons vanilla Mix flour, sugar, and salt, add egg slightly beaten, and milk gradually; cook over hot water twenty minutes, stirring constantly at first; should custard have curdled appearance, it will disappear in freezing. When cool, add cream and flavoring; strain and freeze.
Chocolate Sauce I (To be served with Vanilla Ice Cream) 1½ cups water 1/2 cup sugar 6 tablespoons grated chocolate 1 tablespoon arrowroot 1/2 cup cold water Few grains salt 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Boil water and sugar five minutes. Mix chocolate with arrowroot to which water has been added. Combine mixtures, add salt, and boil three minutes. Flavor with vanilla, and serve hot.
A flour-thickened custard base, cheaper on eggs than a true French custard and more forgiving in a hand-crank freezer. Two things drive the result: cooking the base long enough to lose the raw-flour taste, and chilling it thoroughly before it goes into the machine.
- Cook the base properlyTwenty minutes over hot water is not padding — it hydrates and gelatinizes the flour, which is what keeps this ice cream smooth with only one egg. Cook until the base coats a spoon; Farmer's own reassurance is that if it takes on a curdled appearance it will disappear in freezing, and the base is strained before freezing in any case.
- "Thin cream"Probably in the region of 18-20 percent butterfat, close to modern light cream; half-and-half, at about 10-12 percent, is leaner than what is meant. Heavy cream at 36 percent will give a much richer, denser result — closer to modern premium ice cream, and arguably better, but not what the book intends. A quart is 4 cups.
- VanillaTwo tablespoons reads as excessive to modern eyes; period extracts varied considerably in strength and quality. With good modern extract, start at 1 tablespoon and taste the cold base.
- Chill before freezingThe recipe says only "when cool." Refrigerate the strained base at least four hours, preferably overnight. A base at 40F churns faster, incorporates less ice crystal, and overruns better.
- "Freeze"In 1896 this meant a bucket freezer: crushed ice and rock salt packed around the can, cranked until the mixture was frozen, then the dasher pulled and the can repacked to "ripen" for an hour or two. Any modern machine works; the ripening step still improves texture, done in the freezer.
- YieldThe liquid base alone is about 1½ quarts before churning; with air beaten in, expect nearer 2 quarts finished, serving eight to ten.
- Grated chocolate in the sauceUnsweetened block chocolate, grated so it would disperse. Chopped or finely grated unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; do not substitute cocoa powder, which behaves differently with the arrowroot.
- ArrowrootIt sets clear and glossy where flour would go cloudy. It also thins if overcooked — take the three minutes at a boil as a limit rather than a minimum.
This is the second of several vanilla ice creams in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, sitting alongside plain "Philadelphia" style (cream and sugar, no eggs) and richer custard bases. The flour here looks like a frugality, and it also insures the cook against the curdling that a thin egg custard invites, which is exactly why Farmer tells you not to worry if the base looks broken. Cheap ice was what made any of it possible: the New England ice trade cut, stored and shipped pond ice by the ton through the nineteenth century, so an urban household could buy ice and rock salt as ordinary provisions and crank a freezer on a summer afternoon. The chocolate sauce, served hot over cold ice cream, is the same contrast being sold across the counter at the soda fountain.