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French Ice-Cream
Boil one quart of cream with a long vanilla bean, and then cool and strain. Beat the yolks of a dozen eggs, and mingle with three-fourths of a pound of sugar, mix the flavored cream with the eggs, stir over the fire, take it off as soon as it begins to thicken, and stir for five minutes, then cool and freeze.
A classic crème anglaise base, frozen. The proportions are rich even by ice-cream standards, and the only real difficulty is the moment the custard thickens.
- The hinge"Take it off as soon as it begins to thicken" is the whole recipe. Custard sets at about 170-180F; past 185F the yolks curdle. Cook over low heat or a bain-marie, stir constantly, and pull it when it coats the back of a spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clean line.
- Quantities in modern termsOne quart cream, twelve yolks, and three-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1.7 cups granulated. That is a very rich, very sweet base by current taste; many cooks would cut the sugar to 1 to 1 1/4 cups and use half cream, half whole milk.
- The vanilla beanA "long" bean means a whole pod. Split it lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the cream, and drop the pod in as well; both seeds and pod carry flavour. Steeping off the heat for 20-30 minutes is generally reckoned to draw more out than boiling does.
- TemperingOscar says simply to mix the flavoured cream with the eggs. Pour the hot cream into the yolk-sugar mixture in a thin stream while whisking, or the yolks scramble on contact.
- "Stir for five minutes"This is off the heat, and it matters: it drops the temperature below the curdling point and stops carryover cooking. Straining through a fine sieve immediately afterwards catches any threads of set egg.
- Chill before freezing"Cool and freeze" understates it. Refrigerate the custard several hours or overnight before churning; a cold base freezes faster, and faster freezing means smaller ice crystals.
- Freezing equipmentIn 1896 this meant a hand-cranked bucket churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt. Any modern machine works; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and whisk hard every 30 minutes until set.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts churned, or roughly ten to twelve small servings at the portion size this richness calls for.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf during the years when American hotel cooking was consciously French, and "French ice-cream" was a technical label rather than a nationality: it meant a frozen custard built on egg yolks, as against the Philadelphia style of sweetened cream frozen with no eggs at all. The distinction was standard in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and survives in the labelling of commercial frozen custard today. A dozen yolks to the quart marks this as hotel work rather than household work. The recipe also calls for a whole vanilla bean at a time when extract was cheap and common.