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Chocolate Ice Cream
Have a vanilla ice cream preparation, adding two ounces grated chocolate to the preparation, briskly mixing; cook and proceed to freeze and serve the same way.
A shorthand entry that assumes you already have the book's vanilla ice cream in front of you: a cooked custard base, frozen in a hand-crank churn. The whole recipe hinges on two ounces of chocolate going into a base that was never designed to carry it.
- What the base is"A vanilla ice cream preparation" in a book of this period is most likely a stirred custard of milk or cream, yolks, sugar and vanilla, cooked until it coats a spoon. The instruction to cook confirms it is not a no-cook mixture, though the book's own proportions are not given here.
- Two ounces of chocolateThat is 55 g, about half a cup once grated. Grated chocolate in a book of this period meant unsweetened or barely sweetened block chocolate, not modern eating chocolate. Use unsweetened or a 70% bar; if you use a sweet bar, cut the sugar in the custard by an ounce or so.
- Add it to the hot liquid"Briskly mixing" is doing real work here. Grated chocolate dropped into a finished custard will sit in gritty flecks. Whisk it into the scalded milk before the yolks go in, so the cocoa solids disperse and the cocoa butter melts.
- Custard temperatureCook to 170-175F (77-79C) over gentle heat, stirring constantly. Chocolate custard scorches faster than plain because the cocoa solids settle; a double boiler or a heavy pan and a low flame is worth the trouble.
- Chill before churningThe original assumes an ice-and-salt bucket freezer, which is forgiving. Any modern machine needs the base at refrigerator temperature or below — several hours, ideally overnight — or it will churn to slush.
- The old freezing methodIf you are using a crank freezer: coarse rock salt to crushed ice at about one part to six or eight by volume. More salt freezes faster but coarser. Churn until the paddle labours, then pack and let it harden an hour.
Chocolate is one of the oldest ice cream flavours on record — chocolate sorbetti appear in Italian frozen-dessert writing well before vanilla became the default — and by the turn of the twentieth century it was a fixture of hotel and restaurant service in Europe and America. The extreme brevity of this entry is itself the point: professional compilations of the period were written as aides-memoire for cooks who already knew the master preparations, so a flavour variation could be disposed of in a single sentence. The instruction to grate the chocolate also dates it. Bulk chocolate came as hard blocks or cakes to be scraped down by hand, and the fine, even grating that let it melt cleanly into hot milk was ordinary kitchen labour rather than a step worth explaining.