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Various Ways of Molding Ice Cream
If two or more kinds of cream are to be combined, they may be placed in even layers, the lighter on the heavier. This is called panachée. Where three or more are used they are called Neapolitan. A bombe is made by lining a mold with one frozen mixture, and filling the center with another. Ice cream with a water ice. or mousse center is a good combination.
VANILLA ICE CREAM, No. I-Sweeten one quart of thin cream with three-fourths cup of sugar, flavor with one and onehalf tablespoons of vanilla extract, and freeze. VANILLA ICE CREAM, No. 2-Add to one egg slightly beaten one cup of sugar, one tablespoon of flour, and a speck of salt. Pour on one pint of scalding milk and cook for twenty-five minutes in a double boiler. When cool, add vanilla and one pint of thin cream. Vanilla ice cream is often served with a hot or cold chocolate or strawberry sauce. Maple cream sauce with or without chopped nuts is also used.
Ice cream of any delicate flavor may be prettily served in halves of cantaloupes which have previously been scrubbed thoroughly on the outside and packed in ice until very cold.
Two working ice cream formulas wrapped in a short lesson on molding. Both were written for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, and a few of the assumptions behind them need spelling out.
- The hinge: churn, do not still-freeze"Freeze" here means turning the mixture in a freezer canister while it chills, which keeps the ice crystals small. Poured into a tray and left in the modern freezer, either recipe sets into a solid block. Use an ice cream machine, or beat the mixture thoroughly two or three times during freezing.
- Thin creamThin cream is light or single cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat -- not half-and-half and not heavy cream. Heavy cream substituted straight across gives a heavy, greasy result; cut it with milk to about a fifth fat.
- QuantitiesNo. 1 makes a little over a quart of base, which will churn out to something like a quart and a half depending on the machine, enough for six to eight servings. No. 2 makes about the same volume from half the cream, using a cooked custard to carry the body.
- The flour in No. 2One tablespoon of flour in a pint of milk is a period stabiliser, standing in for the extra egg yolks a French custard would use. Twenty-five minutes over the double boiler is not excessive -- it cooks out the raw starch taste and sets the thickening. Strain the custard before chilling.
- Chill before churning"When cool" should be read as thoroughly cold, ideally refrigerated several hours or overnight. A base that goes into the machine at room temperature churns badly and gives a coarse texture.
- VanillaA tablespoon and a half per quart is generous by modern habit but not wrong for a cream base, where dairy fat mutes flavour. Extract strength was far less standardised then than now, so start with a tablespoon and taste the cold base before freezing.
- Molding a bombeThe mold was buried in ice and salt to set. In a home freezer, line a chilled metal bowl or mold with softened ice cream, freeze the shell hard before filling the centre, and wrap the whole thing well -- salt water must never reach the interior, and freezer air will frost an unwrapped surface.
- Panachée and Neapolitan layersLayers set best when each is frozen firm before the next goes on, and the heavier, higher-fat mixture belongs at the bottom as the text says. Unmold by dipping the mold briefly in warm water.
- Cantaloupe serviceSound advice, and worth keeping: scrub the rind, because cutting through an unwashed melon rind drags surface bacteria into the flesh. Chill the halves hard so they do not melt the cream on contact.
The vocabulary in the first few lines is straight from the French repertoire that governed formal American dessert service around 1900: panachée simply means variegated or mixed, a bombe takes its name from the round or conical mold it is frozen in, and Neapolitan ice cream is generally traced to Italian confectioners working in France and later in the United States, whose layered blocks became shorthand for any three-flavour arrangement. Molded ices were showpieces because they were laborious -- everything depended on a freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked by hand, and on a cellar or ice chest cold enough to hold the finished mold until dinner. That the Butterick book, aimed squarely at the middle-class household rather than the professional kitchen, prints bombes alongside a plain shortcut vanilla made with a single egg and a spoonful of flour says a good deal about the period: commercial ice was cheap and widely delivered, the crank freezer had become an ordinary piece of household equipment, and ambitions once confined to hotel pastry rooms had moved into the family dining room.