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Snow Balls
1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 1 teaspoonful lemon ex- 1/2 pint (I cup) water tract Chopped cocoanut I quart (4 cups) cream 1 tablespoonful vanilla extract Boil the sugar and water together for five minutes; cool, add the cream and the extracts, and freeze. Mold in balls, or pack in round molds.
Before serving roll these balls in the cocoanut.
An uncooked, eggless ice cream — what was called a Philadelphia-style cream — shaped into balls and coated in coconut. The whole thing hinges on chilling the syrup completely before the cream goes in.
- Quantities as written1/2 lb sugar (1 cup) and 1/2 pint water (1 cup) boiled 5 minutes, then 1 quart cream, 1 tablespoon vanilla extract and 1 teaspoon lemon extract. The coconut is unmeasured; about 2 cups of shredded coconut will coat a full batch.
- Cool the syrup fullyFive minutes of boiling dissolves the sugar and reduces the syrup slightly. The recipe says to cool it before the cream goes in; if it is still warm, the mixture takes longer to freeze and the texture is coarser. Chill it to refrigerator temperature first.
- Which cream"Cream" in books of this period is unspecified and varied with how it was separated; it was often lighter than modern heavy cream, nearer light cream or half-and-half. A quart of heavy cream will churn very rich; half heavy cream and half whole milk is a reasonable approximation.
- Freezing"Freeze" means churn in an ice-cream freezer. Any modern machine works. Freezing the mixture solid in a pan without agitation gives a coarse, icy block that will not mold into balls.
- Hardening before shapingStraight from the churn the cream is too soft to hold a ball. Pack it into a container and freeze 2–3 hours until firm, then scoop.
- Molding and coatingUse a spring-release ice cream scoop, drop the balls onto a chilled sheet, and return them to the freezer until hard. Roll in coconut immediately before serving, as the original directs — coconut left on frozen cream turns damp and limp.
- The coconut"Chopped cocoanut" could mean fresh coconut meat grated or chopped fine, or the prepared desiccated coconut already on sale by this date. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flake makes the dessert cloying against the already sweet cream.
- YieldRoughly six cups of mixture before churning, more once air is worked in; enough for something on the order of sixteen to twenty balls of two-inch size.
Eggless ice creams built on nothing but sweetened cream and flavoring were long known as Philadelphia-style, in contrast to the custard-based French style thickened with yolks; American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry the simpler version alongside custard ices, and it is often said to have been favored for needing little or no cooking. "Snow balls" is a name that has attached itself to a great many white, round confections — steamed puddings rolled in coconut, cake balls, and frozen creams like this one — and here it is purely descriptive of the coconut shell. The novelty of the dish is presentation rather than composition, which is exactly the premise of a book promising something different: the same frozen cream, made to arrive at the table looking like something else. Coconut was by then cheap and widely available in desiccated form, and it appears constantly in party desserts of the era for its whiteness as much as its flavor.