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Ice Cream of Two Flavors
Because one owns only one freezer is no reason why one may not enjoy a cream of two flavors. Try making a freezer of vanilla cream and when it is frozen turn one-half of it out into a pail set in a tub of ice and salt. To the portion remaining in the freezer add two ounces of chocolate dissolved in milk and cooled thoroughly. Stir vigorously until the chocolate is well mixed with the cream; then pack it down, put the vanilla cream back over it, cover the can and pack and set it aside until wanted. The work must be done quickly so that the vanilla cream will not have time to get soft.
Instead of the chocolate, crushed fruit of any kind, coffee or pounded nuts may be added to the cream left in the can. Stir the mixture thoroughly, put back the vanilla and pack away. This can be done to perfection, where the cream is molded, by placing the vanilla in the mold first and adding to the remainder the chocolate, fruit or whatever second flavor is desired. This should be stirred well and then placed in the other half of the mold.
This is less a recipe than a maneuver: how to get two flavors out of a single hand-crank freezer. The instructions assume a churn packed in ice and salt and a cook who already has a vanilla base on hand.
- Speed is the whole trickEverything after the vanilla comes out of the can is a race against melting. Have the chocolate melted, cooled and standing by, the pail already buried in ice and salt, and the mold chilled, before you lift the dasher.
- Two ounces of chocolateAlmost certainly unsweetened cooking chocolate, which is what period recipes normally mean by plain 'chocolate'. If so it carries no sugar, and the chocolate half will taste less sweet than the vanilla; add a spoonful or two of sugar syrup if you want them balanced. 'Dissolved in milk' means melted with just enough milk to make a smooth, pourable paste.
- Cool the chocolate completelyWarm chocolate poured into frozen cream will melt it on contact and then seize into gritty flecks as it re-chills. Let it come to room temperature or cooler, and stir it in fast.
- With an electric churnSame logic applies. Churn the vanilla, scrape half into a chilled loaf pan and put it in the freezer, return the rest to the machine with the flavoring and run it thirty seconds to combine, then layer the two and freeze until firm.
- Crushed fruit needs handlingFruit juice freezes into ice shards. Macerate the fruit in sugar, drain it, and cook the drained juice down to a syrup before adding it back, or the second layer will be coarse.
- Coffee and nutsUse a strong cold coffee extract or finely ground instant rather than brewed coffee, which is mostly water. Nuts should be toasted first; pounded raw nuts taste flat against a sweet cream.
- Packing awayThe original 'pack and set aside' means burying the sealed can in a fresh bed of crushed ice and coarse salt; period books commonly give something in the region of three parts ice to one of salt, and the can is covered and left to harden. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job; press plastic wrap onto the surface to keep ice from forming.
- MoldingThe mold method described here is the ancestor of the layered molded ices. Put the vanilla into one half of the chilled mold as the text directs, fill the other half with the flavored cream, cover and freeze several hours before unmolding briefly under a warm cloth.
- YieldNone is given, because it depends on the freezer. A standard household churn of the period held two to four quarts; assume the whole operation serves eight to twelve.
By the time the Butterick Cook Book appeared, the crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt was a fixture of middle-class American kitchens, and ice itself was delivered to the door. What the entry addresses is a specific limitation of that equipment: one can, one flavor, one long session of cranking. The layered result belongs to the family of molded ices the period called bombes and Neapolitan bricks, in which two or three flavors are set in bands or shells and cut across for serving; the Neapolitan name is generally traced to Italian confectioners working in France and England in the nineteenth century, who dominated the ice trade well into the twentieth. The tone of the entry is characteristic of the book as a whole, which was published by a pattern company and written for women managing a household without professional staff: the assumption is not that you lack skill but that you lack a second freezer, and the answer is a bit of clever sequencing rather than a purchase.