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Brown Bread Ice-Cream
Grate enough brown breadcrumbs to fill two breakfast cups; boil a pint of milk and pour over the crumbs, flavoring with a breakfast cupful of noyau or maraschino syrup; when cold turn this preparation into a freezing-pot, and work it until frozen; then place it in the mould and pack in pounded ice and salt for two hours. When ready to serve, dip the mould in tepid water and wipe it, turning the contents out onto a fancy dish.
A late-Victorian ice made from soaked brown breadcrumbs, sweetened and flavoured entirely by a cordial syrup. The method assumes a hand-cranked freezing pot and a mould packed in ice and salt; both translate to modern equipment without much trouble, but the proportions need reading carefully.
- Breakfast cupA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, larger than a teacup. Take it as one standard US cup and you will be close enough; two cups of grated crumbs is about 4 oz by weight of soft brown bread.
- Brown bread here is not Boston brown breadBrown bread here is probably not Boston brown bread -- the recipe most likely intends an English-style wholemeal or wheatmeal loaf, grated into fine crumbs. The steamed, molasses-sweetened Boston brown bread of New England would give a very different flavour and texture.
- NoyauA sweet cordial flavoured with peach or apricot kernels, giving an almond-marzipan note. Commercial noyau syrup is uncommon now; orgeat, almond syrup, or the maraschino syrup Oscar offers as the alternative all fill the same role. Do not attempt a homemade kernel infusion.
- A cupful of syrup is the sugarThere is no other sweetener in the recipe, so the syrup carries the whole sugar load for a pint of milk. If you substitute a liqueur rather than a syrup, the mixture will freeze soft and taste thin without added sugar.
- Freezing-potA pewter or tin canister set in an ice-and-salt bucket and turned by hand, scraped down as it sets. An ice-cream machine does the same work; failing that, freeze in a shallow tray and beat thoroughly every twenty minutes.
- Packing the mouldTwo hours buried in crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt by volume, is the period way of ripening and firming a moulded ice. A freezer at its coldest setting does it just as well; keep the mould covered so the surface does not frost.
- Milk alone makes a hard iceWith no cream and no eggs, this sets very firm and icy by modern standards. Replacing half the milk with cream gives a richer, less icy result, though it moves away from what the original says.
- UnmouldingTepid water, not hot, and only a few seconds; then wipe the mould dry before inverting so no water runs onto the dish.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving four to six.
Brown bread ice cream was a fixture of English and Anglo-American confectionery, often said to date from the nineteenth century, and it survives in Britain still. It belongs to a family of thrift-adjacent sweets in which stale bread is turned into something ornamental, and it also reflects a genuine liking for the malty, slightly nutty flavour wholemeal crumbs give a frozen cream. Some versions toast the crumbs with sugar first, so they caramelise and stay crisp in the finished ice; Oscar's soaks them soft in scalded milk instead, which yields a smoother, more uniform texture suited to turning out of a shaped mould. The moulding is the Waldorf part.