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Chocolate Ice-Cream
Scald one pint new milk, add by degrees three-quarters of a pound sugar, two eggs, and five table-spoons chocolate, rub smooth in a little milk. Beat well for a moment or two, place over the fire and heat until it thickens well, stirring constantly, set off, add a table-spoon of thin, dissolved gelatine, and when cold, place in freezer; when it begins to set, add a quart of rich cream, half of it well whipped.
To make a mold of chocolate and vanilla, freeze in separate freezers, divide a mold through the center with card-board, fill each division with a different cream, and set mold in ice and salt for an hour or more.
To make chocolate fruit ice-cream, when almost frozen, add a coffee-cup of preserved peaches, or any other preserves, cut in fine pieces.
A cooked custard base thinned with cream, frozen in a hand-cranked bucket. It works in a modern machine with almost no change, provided you read the old measures correctly.
- The chocolate"Chocolate" here most likely means solid unsweetened chocolate, grated or scraped from the block, rather than cocoa powder or a sweetened bar. Five tablespoons of gratings is somewhere around 1.5 oz, depending on how fine the gratings are; melt it or rub it smooth with a little cold milk as directed so it does not seize into specks in the custard.
- SugarThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 2/3 cups granulated. That is generous by current taste, but frozen custards need more sugar than they seem to; cutting it much below 1 1/4 cups will give you a hard, icy block.
- Cook the custard to temperature"Heat until it thickens well, stirring constantly" means 170-175F on a thermometer, at which point it coats a spoon. Two eggs in a pint of milk sets slowly and will curdle if it simmers, so use low heat or a bowl over water and strain the finished custard.
- The gelatineA tablespoon of "thin, dissolved gelatine" is the liquid, not the powder: soften about half a teaspoon of powdered gelatine in a tablespoon of cold water, let it swell, then stir it into the hot custard off the fire. It is there as a stabiliser against ice crystals, and more will make the cream rubbery.
- "Place in freezer"The freezer is the ice-and-salt churn, not a compartment. In a modern machine, chill the custard thoroughly first, churn until it thickens, then fold in the quart of cream with half of it whipped, as the original says, and churn to finish.
- Ratio and yieldOne pint of custard base to one quart of cream is a very rich mixture and comes out at roughly 1.5 quarts finished, serving eight to ten. Many domestic machines hold less than that, so check your canister capacity and make it in two batches rather than overfilling.
- The divided moldFor the two-tone mold, pack the mold tightly with no air pockets, remove the cardboard divider before burying the mold in ice and salt, and seal the seam with butter or a strip of cloth so brine cannot seep in. A modern freezer at its coldest setting will do the same work, but allow several hours rather than the hour the original gives for ice and salt.
- The fruit variationA coffee-cup is about a cup. Preserved peaches carry syrup and will soften the set, so drain them well and add them at the very end of churning, when the cream is nearly stiff.
The Dixie Cook Book, like the Buckeye books it grew out of, was compiled at the point when ice cream had moved from a confectioner's luxury to something a well-supplied household could produce at home. Two things made that possible: the commercial ice trade, which put packed ice and coarse rock salt within reach of ordinary town kitchens, and the hand-cranked freezer with its dasher, patented in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and by the 1880s sold in every hardware catalogue. The gelatine here is the era's answer to a problem every home freezer had - without a stabiliser, a custard churned by hand goes grainy within hours - and it stands in for the commercial gums and emulsifiers of later factory ice cream. The divided mold is a domestic echo of the confectioner's bombe, the layered and molded ices that were the showpiece of formal dessert service, scaled down to something a cook could manage with a sheet of cardboard and a tub of ice.