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Nut Ice-Cream
Beat well the yolks of seven or eight eggs in a saucepan and add gradually about twelve ounces of sifted crushed loaf sugar, working it to a froth with a wooden spoon, then pour in one pint of boiling milk and add one stick of vanilla to flavor. Pour the cream into a basin and add six tablespoonfuls of nuts blanched and pounded to a paste with a few blanched sweet almonds. Let the preparation cool, pass it through a fine hair-sieve into a freezer, and when frozen it is ready for use.
A classic French-style custard base, written for a kitchen with a hand-crank freezer and a block of ice. The proportions are rich even by modern standards: eight yolks and twelve ounces of sugar to a single pint of milk.
- Cook the custard, do not just scald itAs written, boiling milk is poured over the yolks and the mixture goes straight to cooling. Pouring hot milk over yolks rarely holds them above 160F for long, so return the pan to low heat and stir to 175F, until it coats the spoon, before straining. This also matters for texture: an undercooked base tastes thin and freezes grainy.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up for use; sifted crushed loaf sugar is simply fine granulated sugar. Twelve ounces is roughly 1 3/4 cups, which is generous for a pint of milk; it can be cut to 8 ounces, though less sugar will freeze somewhat harder.
- One stick of vanillaA vanilla bean, split lengthwise and steeped in the hot milk for ten to fifteen minutes, then scraped and the pod discarded. About 2 teaspoons of extract, stirred in after the custard cools, is the substitute.
- "Sweet" almondsThe word distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which were sold in the period for flavouring and contain amygdalin. Ordinary blanched almonds are what is meant; a small handful is enough, as their role is to round out the nut paste rather than dominate it.
- Pounding the nutsSix tablespoonfuls of blanched nuts, weight and variety unspecified; walnuts, hazelnuts or pistachios all suit. Reckon on roughly 2 to 3 ounces. Grind them in a processor with a spoonful of the cooled custard or a little sugar, which keeps the paste from turning to oily nut butter.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve woven from horsehair, standard in professional kitchens before wire mesh became cheap. Any fine-mesh strainer does the job; press the nut paste through with a ladle and expect some coarse residue to stay behind.
- The freezerAn ice-and-rock-salt canister churn. Chill the strained custard thoroughly, below 40F and ideally overnight, before it goes into a modern machine; a warm base churns slowly and traps large ice crystals.
- YieldRoughly a quart, serving four to six. It contains no cream despite the text calling the base "the cream," and replacing half the milk with heavy cream gives the smoother texture most people now expect.
Ice cream on a hotel menu at the turn of the century commonly meant a cooked egg-yolk custard frozen in a salt-and-ice churn, rather than the uncooked Philadelphia-style cream of American home cookery. The technique follows the French professional pattern: yolks and sugar worked to a ribbon, hot milk added, the whole strained through a hair sieve for smoothness. Blanching and pounding nuts to a paste by mortar was slow work, and the call for a vanilla stick rather than extract is a period marker.