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Caramel Ice-Cream
Place in a copper basin ten ounces of sugar together with a small quantity of water and cook to a caramel, then pour it out onto a marble slab to become cool, after which pound it and again place it in the basin with half a dozen yolks of eggs, a quarter of a vanilla stick, and one pint of boiling milk. Cook over a slow fire without boiling, and remove when it covers the spatula. After it has become cold, add one pint of cream, straining it through a sieve, and freeze.
A classic French-style caramel custard base, written for a kitchen with a copper sugar basin and a marble bench. Everything in it translates directly to modern equipment.
- The hinge: cook to nappe, never to a boilThe custard is done when it coats the back of the spatula and a drawn finger leaves a clear track — roughly 170–175F. Past that the yolks curdle and no amount of straining will make it smooth again; an instant-read thermometer is the easiest insurance.
- Copper basin and marble slabUse any heavy, light-coloured saucepan for the caramel so you can judge colour, and pour the caramel onto an oiled baking sheet or a sheet of parchment instead of marble. Once hard, break it up and crush it in a bag with a rolling pin rather than pounding in a mortar.
- Quantities in modern termsTen ounces of sugar is about 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups (roughly 285 g). A pint in an American book of this kind is almost certainly the US pint, 2 cups; the recipe therefore runs 2 cups milk, 2 cups cream and six yolks ("half a dozen") — a rich but conventional ratio.
- Caramel colourTake the sugar to a deep amber, just short of smoking, or the finished cream tastes merely sweet. The faint bitterness that reads as "caramel" develops only in the final stage of cooking, so the difference between flat and properly caramel is a matter of a few seconds' judgement.
- Adding boiling milkPour the hot milk into the yolk-and-caramel mixture in a thin stream while whisking, then return it to the pan. Dumping it in at once will scramble the yolks before they ever reach the fire.
- Vanilla stickA quarter of a vanilla bean, split, infused in the hot milk and left in until you strain. Half a teaspoon of extract stirred in after the custard has cooled is an acceptable substitute.
- Chilling before churning"After it has become cold" means thoroughly cold — several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. A base churned warm gives coarse ice crystals and poor volume.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and salt; any modern ice-cream machine does the same work. Yield is roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Oscar Tschirky's kitchen notes come from the era when the Waldorf's pastry department worked in the French idiom, and this is textbook crème anglaise with burnt sugar folded into it — the same base that appears in nineteenth-century French manuals under names like glace au caramel. The copper basin and marble slab were standard confectioner's fittings rather than luxuries: copper is generally said to conduct evenly enough to let a cook judge sugar by colour alone, and cold stone stops caramel from cooking on in its own heat. The instruction to pound the set caramel rather than simply dissolving it in the milk may be no more than an inherited habit of the trade. That the recipe assumes a cook who knows what "covers the spatula" looks like tells you who the book was written for.