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Hickory-nut Ice-Cream
Shell a sufficient quantity of hickory-nuts to make a weight of one pound of the kernels. Place them in a mortar with a little sugar and water and pound them to a paste. Put two tablespoonfuls of sugar in a pan over the fire, allow it to melt and brown a little, add water to dissolve and pour in one quart of cream; melt in this two breakfast cupfuls of caster-sugar, add the nut-paste, place all in a freezer, and freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream, meaning no eggs and no cooked custard: cream, sugar, caramel and pounded nuts straight into the churn. The whole thing turns on how finely the nuts are broken down.
- Shelling a pound of hickory nutsShagbark hickory shells are hard and the kernels sit in tight chambers, so a pound of picked-out meat represents a great deal of work and several pounds of nuts in the shell. Pecans are the closest relative and the usual stand-in; they shell in a fraction of the time and give a similar sweet, resinous flavour.
- The mortar, and why the sugar is therePounding oily nuts alone drives them to nut butter. The sugar and water are abrasive and keep the mass a paste rather than a grease. A food processor does the same job in a minute, but pulse it and keep the sugar in from the start.
- "Two breakfast cupfuls" is ambiguousA breakfast cup of the period ran roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so this is somewhere between two and two and a half modern cups of sugar, plus the two tablespoons in the caramel. That is a heavy hand by current taste; around 1 to 1¼ cups total is closer to a modern ice cream, and the mixture will still freeze properly.
- The caramelMelting and browning the sugar dry, then dissolving it with a splash of water, gives a burnt-sugar note rather than sweetness. Take it to a medium amber and stand back when the water goes in, as it will spit. Adding the cream off the heat, or slowly, keeps the caramel from spattering.
- "Place all in a freezer"This means a bucket freezer, an inner canister turned by crank inside a packing of crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. A modern electric churn is a straight substitute. Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first; a cold base churns faster and finer.
- All-cream baseA full quart of cream with no milk and no egg freezes very dense and rich. Splitting it half cream, half whole milk gives a texture nearer what most people expect, though the original richness is plainly the point.
- Yield and holdingClose to two quarts once churned, serving eight to ten as the small portion this would have been. Eggless Philadelphia ice creams harden and turn icy quickly in a home freezer, so serve within a day.
Hickory nuts were a genuinely American luxury: never commercially farmed at scale because the shells resist mechanical cracking, they came into kitchens through foraging and country markets, which is why they show up in nineteenth-century American cookery and almost never in European. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 out of the Waldorf's kitchens, sits at the point where hotel cooking in New York was still largely French in technique but happy to reach for a native ingredient when it flattered the dining room; a nut that cost hours of labour to shell was exactly the sort of quiet extravagance a grand hotel could advertise. The method itself is the Philadelphia style, cream sweetened and frozen without a custard base, as against the egg-rich French ices. The burnt-sugar step gives the nuts a darker background than plain cream would.