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New York Ice-Cream
Put into a saucepan three breakfast cupfuls of milk, one-fourth pound of gelatine, ten tablespoonfuls of sugar, and set the saucepan at the side of the fire, where the milk will heat up by degrees, and thus give the gelatine time to dissolve; stir frequently from the bottom until the milk boils, add a vanilla bean. Pour a little more milk in a bowl, together with the yolks of ten eggs, whisk them well, pour the boiling milk over, and strain into a freezer. The vanilla bean may be wiped and put away to be used another time. When the custard has become cold, and has begun to freeze, whisk the cup of cream to froth, stir it in, and finish the freezing as usual, working the cream until it is twice its original bulk. It is then ready for serving.
A rich custard base stabilized with gelatine, written for a hand-cranked freezer packed in ice and salt. Two figures need attention before you start: the gelatine, which is out of all proportion to modern products, and the cream, which the method calls for but the ingredient list never mentions.
- The gelatine is the problemOne-fourth pound is about 113 g, roughly sixteen envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, in only three cups of milk. That would set into a sliceable block, not ice cream. Nineteenth-century sheet gelatine was weaker and less consistently bloomed than today's, but even so this quantity reads as either a very heavy hand or a printer's error. If you want the stabilizing effect, a teaspoon or two of powdered gelatine bloomed in cold milk is the modern equivalent; anything approaching the stated weight will ruin the batch.
- The missing creamThe recipe says "the cup of cream" although no cream was ever listed. Take it as one cup of heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks and folded in once the custard has chilled and begun to set in the freezer.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is the large morning cup, generally 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treating it as a standard 8 oz cup gives about 700 ml of milk, which suits the rest of the proportions.
- SugarTen tablespoons is a scant two-thirds cup, about 130 g. That is modest for a frozen custard, since cold mutes sweetness; taste the cooled base before churning and add if it seems flat.
- "Set at the side of the fire"On a range this means the coolest part of the stovetop. Use low heat and stir up from the bottom, since both gelatine and milk solids scorch readily.
- Cook the custard, don't just scald itPouring boiling milk over ten yolks tempers them but does not reliably cook them through. Return the mixture to the pan and cook, stirring, to 170-175F (77-79C), until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill thoroughly. An underheated base also tastes thin and eggy.
- The freezer"A freezer" here is a churn with a salted ice jacket. A modern machine does the same work; the instruction to keep working the cream "until it is twice its original bulk" is the period's way of describing overrun, and few domestic machines will double the volume. Expect a dense, custardy result.
- The vanilla beanWiping and reusing a bean is what the recipe directs, and it still works, though a rinsed and dried pod gives progressively less. Split the bean and steep it in the hot milk off the heat for fifteen minutes for far more flavor than dropping it in whole at the boil.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts, or eight to ten modest servings.
"New York ice cream" was broadly a trade description rather than a place-name dish: it indicated a frozen cream built on a cooked egg-yolk custard, as against the plain "Philadelphia" style of sweetened cream and flavoring without eggs, and a version of that distinction still circulates in the ice-cream trade. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, whose name went on this 1896 collection, was recording hotel kitchen practice, and the gelatine fits that: before commercial stabilizers and hard-freezing cabinets, a hotel needed ices that would hold their shape through service in a warm dining room, and gelatine, arrowroot and gum tragacanth were all used to that end. The reused vanilla bean is another institutional touch, from a period when pods were expensive enough to be dried and steeped more than once.