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Vermont Ice Cream
Follow the recipe for French Ice Cream, substituting one and one-half cups Karo, Orange Label.
A one-line variant that assumes you have the book's French Ice Cream in front of you: an egg-yolk custard base, frozen in a hand-crank freezer. The only change is the sweetener, and that change does more to the texture than to the flavour.
- What the base is"French" ice cream in period usage means a cooked custard — yolks, milk or thin cream, sweetener — chilled, then diluted with heavy cream and churned. If you are substituting a modern custard recipe, use one built on yolks rather than a Philadelphia-style uncooked cream base, or the syrup will thin it noticeably.
- Karo Orange LabelKaro was sold in several graded labels, the lighter ones neutral and the darker ones more strongly flavoured. Orange Label is no longer made and its exact formulation is not stated here. The name "Vermont" may point to a maple-flavoured blend, but that is inference, not documented. Light corn syrup gives you the texture but none of the flavour; a maple-flavoured syrup or a mix of light corn syrup with real maple syrup is the closer guess.
- Syrup for sugar is not a straight swapOne and a half cups of syrup is a lot of liquid sweetener, and corn syrup behaves differently from granulated sugar in a frozen mixture: it tends to leave the finished cream softer and smoother, easier to scoop straight from the freezer. Keep to the stated quantity rather than rounding it up.
- Cook the custard properlyBring the yolk mixture to 175-180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; do not let it boil or it will scramble. Strain it, then chill it thoroughly — several hours or overnight. A warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture.
- If you use an ice-and-salt freezerPack roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt around the can, and crank steadily for 20-25 minutes. A modern countertop churn with a pre-frozen bowl works equally well and takes about the same time.
- HardeningStraight from the churn this is soft-serve consistency, more so than a sugar-sweetened cream. Transfer it to a chilled container and give it two to three hours in the freezer before serving.
- YieldDepends entirely on the book's French Ice Cream recipe, which is not reproduced here.
This reads the way it does because it comes from a manufacturer's promotional cookbook rather than a general household manual: Karo corn syrup, made by the Corn Products Refining Company and on the market from the early 1900s, was pushed hard as a substitute for cane sugar, and booklets of this kind existed to show cooks how many familiar dishes could be rebuilt around it. The colour-coded labels — light and dark grades, plus flavoured blends — are probably the reason the recipe can be a single sentence: the reader was presumably expected to know the tins by sight. Syrup-sweetened desserts also had a practical foothold during the sugar shortages of the First World War era, when substitution was patriotic as well as economical, and the trick survived afterward for a good technical reason cooks discovered by feel: corn syrup, a glucose syrup, keeps frozen creams softer and smoother. The name "Vermont" appears to be doing the work of an ingredient list here, signalling maple.