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Hazel-Nut Ice Cream
Shell a pint of hazel nuts and finely chop without skinning them, place on a tin, set in oven with door open and let get a nice brown colour, tossing them once in a while. Remove and let cool off.
Prepare a vanilla ice-cream preparation. Strain it into the freezer, then add chopped nuts and proceed to freeze and serve the same.
The instructions assume you already have a custard base and a crank freezer at hand; everything specific to the nuts is in the first sentence.
- "A pint of hazel nuts"The wording ("shell a pint") reads as a pint measured in the shell, which yields appreciably less than a pint of kernels. The recipe gives no quantity for the ice-cream base, so the proportion of nuts to cream is left to the cook.
- Oven with the door openThe door is left open to keep the heat gentle; no temperature is given. Toast the chopped nuts in a moderate oven only until they colour, tossing once or twice, and watch them closely, since chopped nuts scorch far faster than whole ones.
- Skins left onThe instruction to chop "without skinning them" is deliberate. Modern practice is to rub the papery skins off after toasting because they taste bitter, but leaving them gives a darker, more rustic flecked ice cream. If you dislike the edge, rub them in a towel once cooled.
- "The freezer"This means the metal can of a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, not an appliance. In a modern machine, chill the custard thoroughly first and churn as usual.
- Strain, then add nutsThe straining is for the custard alone, to catch any coagulated egg. Add the nuts only after the base is in the can. Better still, add them when the base has thickened to soft-serve, near the end of churning, so they do not soften in the liquid.
- The vanilla baseNo base recipe is given here. Any cooked custard ice cream will do; cook it to 170-175F so the eggs are safe and the texture is smooth, then chill it fully before churning.
Hazelnuts, or filberts, were long used in European confectionery, and toasted hazelnut ice cream may be set beside the Italian gianduia tradition of the Piedmont, where the local nut was paired with sugar and later chocolate. The recipe's brevity is characteristic: a cook with a standing vanilla base needed only the variation, and "proceed to freeze and serve the same" appears to point back to a master method printed elsewhere in the book. The phrase "strain it into the freezer" is a useful period marker, since the freezer in question was a wooden pail with an inner can turned by hand in a bed of ice and salt, and ice cream was still a dish that took labour rather than a switch.