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Ices
Glittering squares of coloured ice, Sweetened with syrups, tinctured with spice?
Creams and cordial and sugared dates; Syrian apples, Othmanee quinces, Limes and citrons and apricots, And wines that are known to Eastern Princes. * * * * * And all that the curious palate could wish, Pass in and out of the cedarn doors. --T. B. ALDRICH.
Use one part of coarse table salt to two parts of ice broken the size of a walnut. This should be firmly packed around the cream pail to the height of the freezer. For three pints of cream, one and a-half pints of water should be poured over the ice in the freezer, and for every additional quart of cream one pint of water should be added to the ice after packing. When there is no ice-cream freezer convenient, ices may be frozen by putting the cream to be frozen in a tin pail with a close This ice and salt for packing may be put in a larger pail and packed firmly around the pail of cream to be frozen. Let this stand to chill for twenty or thirty minutes, then remove the cover and stir the freezing mixture within until stiff. Then repack, cover the whole closely with a woolen cloth or carpet and leave for an hour or two in a cool place. cover.
This is not a flavour recipe but the packing method that stood behind every ice in the book — the salt-and-ice brine that pulls a custard below freezing. The text as printed is garbled: the phrase "with a close cover" was broken by the typesetter and its tail landed at the very end of the paragraph.
- What "freezer" means hereThe freezer is the wooden bucket; the cream pail (or "can") is the metal cylinder that sits inside it. Salt and ice go in the space between the two, never into the cream itself.
- The salt"Coarse table salt" means rock or ice-cream salt, not fine table salt as sold today. One part salt to two parts ice by volume is an aggressive brine that will freeze fast; three or four parts ice to one of salt freezes more slowly and gives a smoother texture.
- Ice "the size of a walnut"Roughly 1-inch chunks. Crushed ice from a bag is close enough; large cubes leave air gaps and chill unevenly.
- Why water is addedThe pint or so of water poured over the packed ice is not a mistake. It starts the brine circulating immediately so the cold reaches the whole side of the can rather than only the points where ice touches metal.
- The still-freezing method is the hingeWithout a crank freezer you must open the pail and beat the mixture hard once it has set at the edges, scraping the frozen wall into the soft centre. Skip that and you get a solid block of ice crystals rather than an ice.
- One stir is not enoughThe original calls for a single stirring after 20-30 minutes. In practice a still-frozen ice wants beating every 30 to 40 minutes, three or four times, until it is too stiff to work.
- RipeningThe final hour or two under a woollen cloth is the ripening stage, when the texture settles and the flavour comes forward. A modern freezer at about 0F does the same job in a covered container.
- DrainageA wooden bucket has a bung hole for draining meltwater; a plastic or metal substitute does not. Ladle brine off as it rises so it never reaches the lid of the cream pail and seeps in.
- ScaleThree pints of cream is the quantity the packing directions take as their example; larger batches are handled by adding a pint of water to the ice for each additional quart of cream.
Ices belonged to the wealthy until natural ice became a bulk commodity: New England ice was cut from ponds in winter, packed in sawdust and shipped as far as the Caribbean and India, and by the 1870s an American household of modest means could buy ice from a delivery wagon through the summer. The hand-crank freezer with an inner can and an outer bucket of salted ice — the arrangement this page assumes — is generally credited to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s and was cheap and widespread by the time The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago. The verses at the head are Thomas Bailey Aldrich's, and the Eastern fruits and cordials they list are doing familiar work for the period: sherbets and iced confections were understood as a Persian and Ottoman inheritance, and cookbooks liked to say so before getting down to the plain business of salt, ice and a wooden bucket.