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Coffee Ice Cream and Lemon Ice
Coffee ice cream frozen in a cylindrical mould with the center filled with lemon ice. For the ice cream mix two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot, with half a cupful of cold milk. Beat four eggs well and mix with it. Then beat one pint of milk and pour over the mixture and add four cupfuls of white sugar. When it is cool add two quarts of cream. Put it into the freezer and when it is partly frozen, turn in two cupfuls of strong coffee and freeze thoroughly. Pack in a cylindrical mould.
A moulded bombe: coffee custard ice cream lining a cylinder, lemon ice in the middle. The written method compresses several steps, and one line almost certainly lost a word in typesetting.
- The missing verb"Then beat one pint of milk and pour over the mixture" only makes sense as heat — the pint of milk is scalded and poured over the beaten eggs and arrowroot slurry, then the whole returned to the pan and stirred until it thickens. "When it is cool" confirms something was hot. Cook the custard to 170–180F, until it coats a spoon, and strain it.
- ArrowrootTwo tablespoonfuls thicken the base and keep the finished ice cream from turning icy. Slake it in the cold half-cup of milk first, as written, or it will lump. It sets at a lower temperature than flour and loses body if boiled hard, so bring the custard just to thickening and no further.
- The sugarFour cupfuls is about 1 lb 12 oz. Against two quarts of cream and a pint and a quarter of milk it is heavy by modern standards; 2 to 2 1/2 cups gives a cleaner coffee flavour and still freezes softly.
- "Strong coffee"Two cupfuls of brewed coffee, roughly double-strength drip or a long-brewed pot, not espresso. Add it cold: pouring warm coffee into a part-frozen churn will melt the base back. Two cups of water-based liquid also dilutes the mixture.
- The freezerA wooden bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked by hand. A modern churn works, but this recipe makes over a gallon of base — freeze it in two or three batches unless you have a commercial machine.
- Packing the mouldLine a chilled cylindrical mould with the coffee ice cream, pressing it up the sides about an inch thick, fill the centre with lemon ice, cap with more ice cream, and seal the lid with a strip of butter or paper. Bury the mould in ice and salt for two to three hours to ripen, or freeze it hard in a modern freezer, then dip briefly in warm water to turn out.
- The lemon ice is not givenNo method for it appears with this recipe. Any plain water ice will do: a syrup of roughly 2 cups sugar to 4 cups water, boiled and cooled, with the juice of six to eight lemons and a little zest, churned or still-frozen and beaten.
- YieldAround a gallon of base before the coffee goes in — two dozen or more servings from a large bombe, which is what a moulded dessert of this kind was for.
Moulded ices were a showpiece dessert of the late-nineteenth-century American table, and the form has a French name — a bombe, one flavour lining a mould and a contrasting one filling the centre, though a bombe mould is properly dome-shaped rather than cylindrical. The pairing here is deliberate: rich coffee custard against a lean, sharp water ice, fat against acid, brown against pale yellow when the cylinder is cut across. That such a thing could be attempted at home depended on the commercial ice trade putting cheap block ice within reach of ordinary households and on the hand-crank freezer. Arrowroot, milled from the rhizome of a tropical plant and long a fixture of the invalid kitchen, would help a custard survive hours of ripening in salt and ice without going grainy.