Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Vanilla Ice-Cream
Vanilla Ice-Cream
Mix thoroughly together one quart of nice fresh cream, a well-beaten egg and one pound of powdered white sugar; add one-fourth of a vanilla bean cut into pieces, place it over the fire in a saucepan and keep it stirred constantly till on the point of boiling; then remove it from the fire and strain it through a fine sieve. When cold place it in a freezer and stir until well frozen. Repack the freezer with ice and let the ice cream remain well covered until frozen.
A lean hotel custard base — one egg to a quart of cream — that depends almost entirely on the quality of the cream and the bean. Two things need translating: the sugar load and the machine.
- "On the point of boiling"With only one egg in a quart of cream there is little to curdle, but the mixture still wants steady stirring over moderate heat until it just begins to steam and thicken very slightly (around 170-175F). Take it off before it actually boils; a hard boil will scramble what little egg is there and leave grit the sieve has to catch.
- A pound of sugarThat is about 2¼ cups, roughly double what a modern quart-based ice cream uses. Beyond sweetness, sugar depresses the freezing point, so the original churns to a softer, slower-freezing product. Cutting it to 6–8 oz gives a cleaner flavour but a harder, iceier set.
- The vanilla beanA quarter bean for a quart is thin by current standards, when beans were a relatively expensive flavouring. Split a whole bean, scrape the seeds into the cream, and steep the pod in the hot custard before straining.
- "Powdered white sugar"In 1896 this meant ordinary granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Plain granulated is the correct substitution; it dissolves fully in the hot cream anyway.
- "Place it in a freezer"The freezer is a hand-crank ice-and-salt bucket, not the appliance. Chill the strained custard thoroughly — overnight is better than "when cold" — before it goes into any machine, since a warm base churns to a coarse crystal.
- RepackingThe final step is hardening, not freezing: the churned cream is buried in fresh ice and coarse salt and left to firm up. In a modern kitchen this is an hour or two in a covered container in the deep freeze, which does the same job of setting the texture.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts once churned, serving eight generously in the small dishes of the period.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel when it opened in 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, at a point when a New York hotel serving iced cream year-round drew on the enormous natural ice trade — lake and river ice cut in winter, packed in sawdust, and sold through the summer — alongside the manufactured ice and mechanical refrigeration already widely used in the city's hotels by that decade. That commercial ice, and the coarse rock salt that went with it, is what the instruction to "repack the freezer" assumes. Vanilla ice cream itself long predates the Waldorf; it appears in American manuscript and printed cookery from the late eighteenth century onward, Thomas Jefferson's often-cited handwritten recipe among them. What might be read as marking this version as a hotel formula rather than a household one is the ratio: a full quart of cream, no milk, and a single egg used more for body than for richness, on the assumption that the cream is good enough to carry the dish alone.