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Pecan Cream
1 square chocolate
1 cup pecan nut-meats
⅔ cup sugar
⅔ teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons boiling water
⅛ teaspoon salt
2 cups thin cream
Melt the chocolate, add sugar, and cook with water until smooth and glossy. Add the cream slowly, then the salt, the pecan-meats crushed into small pieces, and the vanilla. Cool and freeze. Serve with a topping of whipped cream and a few pecan-meats. Other nuts may be used instead of the pecans, if desired.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooked custard — so it lives or dies on the fat content of the cream and on how cold the mixture is when it goes into the machine.
- One square chocolateBaking chocolate was sold in scored one-ounce squares, and it meant unsweetened chocolate. Use 1 oz unsweetened; a modern semi-sweet square will throw the sugar off.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" is light or single cream, roughly 18–20% butterfat — closest today to half-and-half or a mix of equal parts heavy cream and whole milk. Straight heavy cream will churn nearly to butter in a modern machine.
- The hinge: cook the chocolate paste properlyMelt the chocolate, stir in the sugar and the 2 tablespoons boiling water, and work it over low heat until it is genuinely smooth and glossy before any cream goes in. Add cream to a grainy paste and the sugar never dissolves; the finished cream tastes sandy.
- Add the cream slowlyChocolate seizes if cold liquid hits it fast. Dribble in the first half-cup while stirring, then the rest.
- Cool means cold"Cool and freeze" assumed an ice-and-salt freezer that would drop the temperature hard. Refrigerate the mixture to about 40F, at least four hours, before churning in a modern machine — 20 to 25 minutes of churning, then two hours in the freezer to firm.
- Nuts go in lateNuts -- The original stirs the crushed pecans in before freezing. If you prefer them more distinct in texture, add them near the end of churning instead; this is a departure from the recipe. Toasting them first for 8 minutes at 350F is also not in the original but costs nothing.
- SaltAn eighth teaspoon in two cups of cream is doing flavour work, not preservation. Keep it; chocolate without salt reads flat.
- YieldAbout a quart — four to six servings with the whipped cream topping.
Butterick's frozen-dessert chapter belongs to the moment when ice cream had moved from a luxury bought at a confectioner's to something a household could make on a back porch with a crank freezer, a block of ice and coarse salt. Recipes of this type — cream, sugar, flavouring, no eggs — are generally called Philadelphia-style, distinguished from the richer French custard bases, and they appear often in American domestic manuals, being quicker and needing no custard to be judged by eye. The pecan is the American note here: native to the Mississippi valley and the South, it was being planted in commercial orchards by the late nineteenth century, and the closing line allows other nuts to be substituted.