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Caramel Ice Cream
Follow the recipe for French Ice Cream, using Karo, Blue Label, and adding to the scalded milk two tablespoons granulated sugar, carmelized and melted in one-fourth cup boiling water.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's French Ice Cream (a cooked egg-custard base sweetened largely with corn syrup) in front of you. The whole of the new work here is the caramel, and the caramel is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: adding water to hot caramelMelt the two tablespoons of sugar dry in a heavy pan over medium heat until it is the colour of an old penny, then take it off the heat before pouring in the boiling water. It will spit and seize violently; add the water in a thin stream, at arm's length, and stir until the hardened caramel redissolves into a smooth syrup. Cold water makes the spitting worse, which may be why the original specifies boiling.
- Karo, Blue LabelBlue Label was one of several graded Karo syrups, lighter than the Red Label but not the pure, colourless Crystal White; period descriptions of its exact make-up differ. Ordinary light (golden) corn syrup is the closest current equivalent, and any difference matters little once caramel is added.
- Two tablespoons is a whisper of caramelTwo tablespoons of caramelized sugar gives colour and a faint bitterness rather than a caramel-forward ice cream. If you want a more pronounced caramel, increase it and reduce the sweetener in the base to keep the total sugar in balance.
- Scalded milkScalding means bringing the milk to about 180F, until it steams and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge — not a rolling boil. Stir the caramel syrup in at this point so it disperses before the eggs go anywhere near it.
- Cook the custard properlyThe custard base should reach 170-175F on a thermometer and coat the back of a spoon. Above about 180F it curdles; strain it regardless, since a stray thread of cooked egg or undissolved caramel will show up in the finished texture.
- Chill before churningThe book was written for an ice-and-salt hand freezer, where a warm mixture simply melted the ice. Chill the strained base thoroughly — four hours or overnight — before it goes into any machine. Corn syrup helps here: it depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice cream scoopable straight from the freezer.
- Salt ratio, if you use a crank freezerRoughly one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice by volume, packed in layers. More salt freezes faster but coarser.
History: The reliance on a named, labelled brand of corn syrup points to the promotional recipe literature the corn-products industry circulated in the early twentieth century, when glucose syrup was still working to establish itself as a respectable household sweetener rather than a suspected adulterant of cane sugar. Karo is generally dated to about 1902 and was sold in several labelled grades, and pamphlets of this kind existed to show cooks that the syrup could stand in for sugar in familiar dishes. Ice cream was a shrewd choice of demonstration: corn syrup genuinely improves it, since invert and glucose sugars interfere with ice-crystal growth and keep the texture smooth, a fact confectioners had long exploited empirically and that commercial ice cream makers still rely on. Caramel variations of this sort were a period commonplace, "burnt sugar" being a common way to add both colour and a darker flavour note before commercial extracts and caramel colouring were kitchen staples.