No. 3447

Caramel Ice Cream

Creme au Caramel

Put ten ounces of sugar in a copper basin with very little water, cook to caramel, then pour it on a marble to get cold; pound and return it to the basin with six egg-yolks, a quarter of a vanilla stick and a pint of boiling milk. Cook this preparation on a slow fire without boiling, remove it from the range when it covers the spatula, and when cold add a pint of cream; strain through a sieve and freeze.

← No. 3446 Andalusian Ice Cream—Without Cooking Ices & Ice Creams No. 3448 Columbia Ice Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward cooked custard base, but Ranhofer assumes you know how far to take the caramel and how to keep a stirred custard from scrambling. Read the sugar and the custard steps before you start; everything else is routine.

The hinge: the custard must not boil"Cook this preparation on a slow fire without boiling" means hold it at 170-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of the spoon (Ranhofer's spatula). Past about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining will fix the texture.
Cooking the caramelTen ounces of sugar with a splash of water, taken to a deep amber; when it smells nutty and the color is the shade of an old penny, it is done. Stopping too early gives a sweet, flat ice cream, and taking it past dark mahogany turns it acrid.
The marble and the poundingThe recipe pours the caramel onto a marble slab, where it sets into a brittle sheet to be broken and pounded in a mortar. A sheet pan lined with a nonstick mat and a few pulses in a food processor does the same job; the powder dissolves into the milk faster than a solid lump.
Copper basinAn unlined copper sugar pan conducts heat evenly and lets you judge color. Any heavy-bottomed stainless or copper-core saucepan works. Nonstick is a poor choice here, as the dark surface makes the caramel's color hard to read.
MeasuresA pint here is the American 16 fl oz. Ten ounces of sugar is by weight, roughly 1 1/3 cups granulated. A quarter of a vanilla stick is about 1 1/2 inches of bean, split, or 1/2 teaspoon extract stirred in after the custard has cooled.
CreamThe "cream" of a nineteenth-century professional kitchen was hand-skimmed and richer than modern light cream. Heavy cream is the sensible substitute; half-and-half will freeze hard and icy.
Chill and age before freezingChill before freezing -- Strain, then refrigerate the base until it is thoroughly cold, ideally overnight. A warm base churns slowly and traps less air.
YieldA pint of milk and a pint of cream plus sugar and yolks gives well over a quart of base, nearer a quart and a half, and more again once churned. Churn in an ice cream maker until it holds soft ridges, then firm it in the freezer for a few hours.

A Little History

This is entry 3447 in The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's vast catalogue of the cooking he oversaw for some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York. The book is organized as a professional reference rather than a domestic cookbook, which explains the terse phrasing, the numbered cross-references, and the assumption of a copper sugar pan and a marble slab. The technique itself is French: a crème anglaise enriched to ice-cream strength and flavored by dissolving hard caramel back into the milk, a method that gives the bitter edge no amount of browned sugar syrup can match. Caramel as an ice cream flavor was well established in fine dining by the 1890s, sitting in Ranhofer's list alongside dozens of others—Andalusian, Columbia, and every fruit then available to a New York kitchen—in an era when a restaurant's freezing room was a serious point of pride.