No. 3450

Cinnamon, Ginger or Pumpernickel Rye Bread Ice Cream

Glace Creme a la Canelle, au Gingembre ou au Pumpernickel Pain de Seigle

With Cinnamon.—Infuse one ounce of cinnamon in a quart of boiling milk. Place twelve ounces of sugar in a basin with eight egg yolks; beat and add the infusion; mix so that the sugar dissolves, cook without boiling, then cool and pass through a fine sieve; freeze and mix in a few vanilla chocolate pastilles, each half an inch in diameter.

Ginger.—Substitute ginger for the cinnamon and finish the same.

Pumpernickel Rye Bread.—Grate half a pound of rye bread and pass it through a coarse sieve or colander; pour into a vessel and throw over a pint of thirty-degree syrup. Break twelve egg-yolks in a tin basin, add eight ounces of sugar, mix well with a pint of boiling milk; cook this on a slow fire without boiling, remove and when cold strain through a sieve, freeze, adding the rye bread when nearly frozen and two quarts of whipped cream (No. 50).

← No. 3449 Chocolate and Cocoa Ice Cream Ices & Ice Creams No. 3451 Fresh Fruit Ice Creams—Without Eggs or Cooki →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three variations on a cooked custard base from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen. The hinge is the same in all of them: the custard is cooked without boiling, and a boiled yolk custard curdles past saving.

Custard temperature"Cook without boiling" means bring the yolk-and-milk mixture to 170-180F, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon. Above about 185F the yolks scramble; the sieve that follows will catch small flecks but not rescue a broken custard.
One ounce of cinnamonThat is a substantial quantity of broken cinnamon stick (roughly eight to twelve sticks, depending on thickness) steeped in the quart of hot milk, not ground cinnamon. Infuse, then strain. Ground spice will pass the fine sieve and leave the cream gritty.
GingerThe recipe says only to substitute ginger and finish the same. Since the instruction assumes an infusion, use a form you can strain out -- fresh ginger peeled and sliced thin, or dried whole ginger -- rather than powdered.
Thirty-degree syrupA syrup at 30 degrees Baume, a standard sugar density of the period: roughly 55 per cent sugar by weight, or about 1.25 parts granulated sugar to 1 part water, brought to a boil until dissolved and cooled. A pint of it over half a pound of grated bread is a very sweet, very wet mixture by design.
PumpernickelRanhofer means a dense dark German rye, not the sliced supermarket loaf. Grate it stale so the crumbs hold some texture in the frozen cream rather than dissolving to sludge.
Vanilla chocolate pastillesSmall flat chocolate drops. Modern chocolate chips or thin discs of tempered dark chocolate serve; fold them in at the end of churning, when the cream is stiff, or they sink.
Whipped creamTwo quarts of whipped cream folded into the rye version turns it into something closer to a frozen mousse than a churned ice cream. Fold it in after the base is nearly frozen and finish in the freezer; a modern machine will not hold that volume.
YieldThe cinnamon and ginger versions make about 1.5 quarts. The rye bread version, with the cream folded in, comes to something approaching a gallon and was scaled for a restaurant. Halve or quarter it for home use.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working archive, spice infusions and Baume readings included. The bread ice cream in the third variation belongs to an older northern European habit of using stale dark bread as a flavouring rather than a filler: brown bread ice cream appears in English cookery books from the late eighteenth century onward, and German and Austrian kitchens made similar frozen creams with grated pumpernickel and rum. The soaking of the crumbs in heavy syrup keeps them from freezing hard, and the toasted, faintly sour malt of the rye reads as a flavour in its own right, closer to caramel than to bread. Grouping it with cinnamon and ginger under one number is a fair indication of how Ranhofer thought: three infusions of a single custard, filed together for the cook working the ice station.