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Vanilla Ice Cream, One Quart
Six egg yolks, eight ounces powdered sugar, one pint cream, one pint fresh milk and one stick vanilla. Place the egg yolks and sugar in a small saucepan and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Place the cream, milk and vanilla into another small saucepan and let come to a boil; then immediately pour it into the eggs and sugar, little by little, carefully mixing with the wooden spoon while heating for five minutes; but under no circumstances allow it to boil.
Remove it from the fire, pour in a bowl and let thoroughly cool off. Remove the vanilla and strain the cream through a Chinese strainer into a small ice-cream freezer. Place the freezer in a tub, see that the freezer is completely buried in cracked ice mixed with rock salt, then briskly freeze for thirty minutes, seeing that the ice cream is thoroughly firm. Have a cold dessert dish with a folded napkin ready, dress the ice cream on the dish and send to the table.
N. B. Wipe, place and keep the vanilla bean in a small box buried in powdered sugar, and use again for four or six times when required. Punch Lalla Rookh is simply vanilla ice cream mixed with rum. Prepare a pint only of vanilla preparation, and just before freezing add half a gill good rum. Divide it into six punch glasses and serve.
A straightforward crème anglaise frozen in a bucket freezer, written for a cook who already knows how to run one. The whole recipe hinges on the line "under no circumstances allow it to boil."
- The custard temperatureFive minutes over the fire is a guide, not a rule. Take the custard to 175-180F, when it coats the back of the spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean track; past about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining fully recovers it.
- Powdered sugarIn 1906 this means finely milled granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use eight ounces of ordinary granulated or caster sugar, about one and one-eighth cups.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve will do the same job of catching chalazae and any threads of set egg.
- A stick of vanillaOne vanilla bean, split or left whole and infused in the hot dairy. The note about drying it and burying it in sugar is sound practice and still worth doing, though four to six further uses is optimistic once the seeds are gone.
- A gillHalf a cup, so the half gill of rum for Punch Lalla Rookh is four tablespoons into a pint of base. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, which is why that version stays slushy and is served in glasses rather than scooped.
- Freezing without a bucket freezerChill the strained custard thoroughly, ideally overnight, before it goes into any machine. In a hand-crank or salt-and-ice freezer, use roughly three parts cracked ice to one part rock salt by volume; in a modern compressor or frozen-bowl machine, churn 20-30 minutes and then harden in the freezer for two hours.
- Yield and servingThe base comes to something over a quart before air is worked in, so the finished yield will run past the titled quart; count on six to eight servings. The folded napkin under the dish absorbs meltwater and condensation, a service detail rather than a decoration.
Alexander Filippini wrote The International Cook Book (1906) as a calendar, three menus for every day of the year, and this ice cream sits in the run-up to a January dinner ending in Cabinet Pudding and Babas au Rhum. The custard-and-cream base is the standard French glace à la vanille Filippini would have learned in professional kitchens, and the appended Punch Lalla Rookh belongs to the nineteenth-century fashion for a soft spirit-spiked ice served in glasses partway through a long dinner. The name comes from Thomas Moore's 1817 verse romance Lalla Rookh, a bestseller whose Eastern setting lent its title to everything from ships to sorbets, and the punch is generally traced to the Orientalist fashion that followed it rather than to any single chef.