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Brown Bread Ice Cream
Soak for fifteen minutes one and and one-fourth cups of dried brown bread crumbs in one quart of thin cream. Rub through a sieve add one cup of sugar and a pinch of salt. Pour on this one more pint of cream. Freeze.
A no-cook ice cream that depends entirely on the bread you use and on how finely the soaked crumbs are broken down. Everything else is straightforward churning.
- What "brown bread" means hereIn an American book of this period this is most likely a dark wholemeal or graham loaf rather than steamed Boston brown bread, though the steamed rye-and-cornmeal kind gives a good, molasses-scented result. Avoid anything sweetened or seeded; a plain dense wholemeal loaf is closest to the original intent.
- Drying the crumbsCrumbs are dried, not fresh, and the drying keeps them from collapsing to paste in the cream. The recipe gives no method or temperature; drying coarse crumbs on a sheet in a low oven, around 300F, until crisp takes roughly 15-20 minutes. Cool them before soaking.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" is roughly today's light or single cream, about 18-20 percent fat. Light or single cream is the closest match; half-and-half is lower in fat but will do at a pinch. Using all heavy cream will make the mixture cloying.
- Total quantitiesOne quart plus one pint is six cups of cream in all, with one cup of sugar. That is about 1.5 quarts of base, and rather more once churned; enough for eight to ten.
- The sieveRubbing the soaked crumbs through a sieve is the hinge of the recipe. It breaks the bread into the cream so the texture reads as faintly grainy rather than soggy; skip it and you get wet lumps suspended in ice. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same job, but push it through a medium sieve afterwards regardless.
- Chill before freezingThe original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, where the mixture cools slowly. In a modern machine, refrigerate the finished base until thoroughly cold, ideally several hours, before churning.
- Sweetness and saltOne cup of sugar in six cups of cream is a little restrained by modern standards, and dark bread mutes sweetness further. Taste the base cold before churning; cold dulls sugar, so a mixture that tastes right at room temperature will read as bland once frozen.
Brown bread ice cream belongs to a small family of Victorian and Edwardian frozen puddings built on toasted crumbs rather than fruit or chocolate: brown bread, pumpernickel and macaroon ices all appear in English and American books through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the brown bread version is still made in Ireland. The appeal is partly thrift and partly texture, since crisp dried crumbs stay slightly gritty in the frozen cream and give it something to chew. Its presence in the Butterick Cook Book, published by the pattern company as part of its broad line of household guidance for middle-class women, reflects the moment when ice-cream freezers had become common domestic equipment and a chapter of ices was expected in any general cookbook. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book: it assumes the reader already owns a freezer, knows how to pack it with ice and salt, and needs only the proportions.