Home › Ice-Creams and Ices › Chocolate Ice Cream
Chocolate Ice Cream
Use the vanilla recipe, adding four ounces of grated chocolate to the milk before scalding and using a couple of ounces more sugar than for the vanilla cream.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's vanilla ice cream in front of you, which is a cooked custard base frozen in an ice-and-salt churn. The two changes are the chocolate and the extra sugar, and both need a little translation.
- What "grated chocolate" meansIn 1900s American cookbooks unqualified "chocolate" generally means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in hard cakes that had to be grated or shaved. Four ounces is four squares of modern unsweetened bar chocolate; chopping it fine will do the same job once it hits scalding milk. Do not substitute cocoa powder one for one, as it lacks the cocoa butter that gives this its body.
- The extra sugar is not optionalUnsweetened chocolate is bitter and also stiffens the mix, so the two additional ounces (about 1/4 cup) balance the flavour and keep the frozen texture from turning hard and crumbly. Sugar depresses the freezing point; cutting it back gives you a block, not a cream.
- ScaldingThe chocolate goes into the milk before it is heated. Bring the milk to about 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge, stirring until no specks remain, then proceed with the custard as the vanilla recipe directs.
- Cook the custard properlyIf the base recipe is egg-thickened, take it to 170-175F on a thermometer, until it coats the back of a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean track. Strain it before chilling; grated chocolate tends to leave a few unmelted flecks.
- Chill before freezingThe original assumed a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt; period manuals commonly suggest something in the region of three parts ice to one of salt, though this recipe says nothing about the proportion. Whether you use one of those or a modern machine, refrigerate the custard until thoroughly cold, ideally several hours, or it will churn slowly and freeze coarse.
- RipeningPeriod ice cream was packed down and left to "ripen" an hour or more in the salted ice. The modern equivalent is a few hours in the freezer in a shallow covered container, which firms the texture and settles the chocolate flavour.
- YieldIf the base vanilla recipe starts from a quart of milk, expect roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts churned, serving about eight.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose readership was middle-class households running a kitchen without a full staff, and its ice cream chapter reflects the moment when the hand-cranked freezer had become an ordinary domestic possession rather than a confectioner's tool. The habit of writing flavours as short amendments to a master vanilla recipe was standard in cookbooks of this period and saved a great deal of type. Chocolate ice cream itself is older than the book by well over a century; chocolate creams appear in eighteenth-century European ice recipes, and by the late 1800s chocolate is often said to have ranked with vanilla and strawberry as one of the three flavours any American soda fountain was expected to have. Grating the chocolate was a way of handling the ingredient as it was then sold: in bar form and unsweetened.