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Pistachio Ice Cream
Add two handfuls of blanched pistachio nuts and one tablespoon of vanilla with one teaspoon of almond extract to the vanilla recipe.
The nuts are best ground with a vegetable grinder.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's vanilla ice-cream base in front of you, which in this era means a cooked custard of milk, cream, sugar and eggs frozen in a hand-cranked churn. The notes below cover what the shorthand leaves out.
- Two handfuls of nutsAn unhelpful measure by modern standards. The recipe does not say how large the vanilla base is; if it makes about a quart, reckon on roughly 4 oz (about 1 cup) of shelled, blanched pistachios, which gives clear flavor without turning the texture gritty.
- BlanchingPistachios are blanched the same way as almonds: cover the shelled nuts with boiling water, stand two or three minutes, drain, and rub the skins off in a towel. Skipping this leaves brown flecks and a slightly bitter note.
- The vegetable grinderA hand-cranked meat-and-vegetable mincer clamped to the table. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job, but stop while the nuts are still coarse crumbs; run it long and you get pistachio butter, which will make the custard heavy.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon is a lot by current taste if the base is only about a quart. Half a teaspoon is closer to a modern balance, and it is there to sharpen the pistachio, not to be tasted on its own.
- ColorThe recipe gives none, so expect a pale ivory-flecked cream rather than the bright green sold today. Green pistachio creams of the period were sometimes tinted, with vegetable coloring or spinach juice.
- When to add the nutsStir the ground nuts in during the last few minutes of churning, or fold them through before ripening. Added to the hot custard they soften and lose their character.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern machine, chill the custard thoroughly overnight first, then churn and ripen the cream in the freezer for two hours before serving.
- YieldIf the vanilla base makes a quart, these additions will serve six to eight.
Pistachio was one of the standard flavors in the American ice-cream repertoire long before the Butterick book appeared, and it belongs to a family of nut creams — almond, filbert, burnt almond, pistachio — that nineteenth-century confectioners treated as a set. The reliance on almond extract here is telling: pistachios were an expensive imported nut, and their delicate flavor is reinforced with a cheaper almond note. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book for the same middle-class household that bought its patterns, and the entry's brevity reflects its dependence on an earlier recipe: it simply refers the reader back to "the vanilla recipe."