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Chestnut Ice-Cream
Into a saucepan with twelve ounces of sugar put six ounces of chestnut flour, one stick of chopped vanilla, one and one-half pints of cream and the yolks of eight eggs. Beat all well together, and stir it over the fire until thick; then strain, pass it through a coarse hair-sieve, freeze it, add one-half pint of whipped cream, set it in a mould and pack in ice and salt; unmould just when serving.
A rich cooked custard base thickened with chestnut flour rather than the usual cornstarch or flour, then churned and moulded. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the custard below the point where the yolks curdle, and getting the chestnut flour smooth.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boilCook it over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring, until it coats a spoon at about 175-180F. Beyond that the eight yolks scramble and no amount of sieving will save the texture.
- Chestnut flourSold as farina di castagne in Italian groceries and online; it is naturally sweet, faintly smoky, and lumps badly. Whisk it into the cold cream and sugar before any heat goes under the pan, or sift it in.
- "One stick of chopped vanilla"A whole vanilla bean, chopped so the seeds and pod scent the custard. Split and scrape one bean into the cream instead, then strain the pod out; or use about 2 teaspoons of extract added off the heat.
- MeasuresTwelve ounces of sugar is by weight, roughly 1 3/4 cups; six ounces of chestnut flour is about 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups. A pint and a half of cream is 3 cups, plus a further cup whipped at the end. The result is very sweet by current taste, though sugar also keeps the ice cream soft, so reducing it will firm and coarsen the texture.
- "Pass it through a coarse hair-sieve"Sieves of woven horsehair were the standard straining kit of the period and came in several grades; this one is specified coarse. Any fine-mesh sieve does the job, and it is worth doing twice, since chestnut flour leaves grit.
- Chill before churningThe instruction to freeze follows straight on, but the custard must be cold first. Refrigerate it several hours, then churn in an ice-cream machine; fold in the whipped cream after churning, as written, for a semifreddo-like lightness.
- Moulding, ice and saltPacking a filled mould in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt is a way of holding and ripening the ice cream without a freezer. A metal mould or loaf pan in the deep freeze for four hours does the same. To unmould, dip the outside briefly in warm water.
- YieldRoughly 1 3/4 to 2 quarts before churn overrun, or ten to twelve small servings; the richness makes larger portions heavy.
Chestnut flour was a staple carbohydrate long before it was a luxury flavouring, ground from dried chestnuts in Corsica, Tuscany and the Limousin where grain grew poorly. In American dining rooms at the end of the nineteenth century, marrons glacés, chestnut purée and chestnut ices read as continental and expensive, which is part of why they earned a place on hotel menus. The technique here is essentially a French crème anglaise stiffened with the flour, frozen, finished with whipped cream folded in, and moulded for service.