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Tea Ice-Cream
Pour over four table-spoons of Old Hyson tea, a pint of cream, scald in a custard-kettle, or by placing the dish containing it in a kettle of boiling water, remove from the fire, and let stand five minutes; strain it into a pint of cold cream, put on to scald again, and when hot mix with it four eggs and three-fourths pound sugar, well beaten together; let cool and freeze. - Miss A. C. L., Pittsfield.
A green-tea custard ice cream from the era of the hand-crank bucket freezer. The whole thing hinges on treating the tea gently and the custard patiently.
- Old Hyson teaHyson is a Chinese green tea, sold in period grades that included Young Hyson (the smaller, early-picked leaf) and Hyson; "Old Hyson" turns up in period listings and appears to mean a coarser, later-picked leaf, though the grading terms were used loosely. Any loose-leaf Chinese green — gunpowder is the closest widely available cousin — will do; four tablespoons of loose leaf to a pint of cream is a strong but deliberate infusion.
- Steeping time is the hingeFive minutes off the heat, then strain. Green tea left in hot cream longer turns astringent and faintly bitter, and no amount of sugar hides it. Strain the moment the time is up rather than letting the leaves sit while you assemble the rest.
- Custard-kettleA double boiler. The instruction to set the dish in a kettle of boiling water is the same thing improvised, and it is still the right method — direct heat will curdle a cream-and-egg mixture this rich.
- Cooking the custardTemper the beaten eggs and sugar with a little hot cream before combining, then cook over the water bath, stirring, until the custard reaches 175–180F and coats a spoon. The original assumes the cook knows this; "when hot mix with it four eggs" is not the end of the cooking.
- SugarThree-fourths pound is 12 ounces, roughly 1 3/4 cups — very sweet by current taste. Six to eight ounces gives a dessert most people prefer, though cutting sugar hard will make the finished ice cream noticeably firmer and icier.
- Freezing"Freeze" meant a churn packed with crushed ice and rock salt. Chill the custard thoroughly — overnight is better than "let cool" — then churn in any modern machine and ripen in the freezer an hour or two before serving.
- YieldA quart of cream plus eggs and sugar makes a generous quart and a half, about eight servings.
Tea ice creams sit alongside coffee, chocolate and caramel in nineteenth-century American "Ices and Ice-Cream" chapters, where the pattern is always the same: infuse a flavouring into scalded cream, build a custard on it, freeze it in a salted ice bucket. Hyson was one of the green teas that dominated the American tea trade before Indian and Ceylon black teas took over late in the century, and its name appears in period grocers' lists and price currents often enough that a cook reaching for "four table-spoons of Old Hyson" was reaching for something ordinary. The cookbook credits contributors by initials and town — "Pittsfield" — a reminder that these books were assembled from working household receipts rather than written by a single author, and that ice cream by then was well within the reach of an ordinary kitchen with a freezer and access to ice.