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Hickory Nut Ice Cream
For hickory nut ice cream, make a boiled custard of one pint of milk, one and three-quarters cupfuls of sugar, four eggs and one-third of a teaspoonful of salt. When it is cold add one quart of cream and two cupfuls of hickory nut meats that have been powdered fine in a mortar; then freeze.
A straightforward French-style custard base, unusual only in its nut — and in the assumption that you own an ice-cream freezer and a mortar. The hinge is the custard: cook it to 170–175F, stirring, and pull it the moment it coats a spoon.
- The custardWhisk the eggs with the sugar and salt, temper in the scalded milk, then cook over low heat or a water bath to 170–175F. Above about 180F the eggs curdle and no amount of stirring recovers a smooth base; strain it anyway before chilling.
- Chill properly"When it is cold" means thoroughly cold — refrigerate the custard at least four hours, or overnight. A warm base churns to a coarse, grainy texture and takes far longer to set.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is the usual species; the nuts are small, oily and stubbornly shelled, and are rarely sold commercially. Pecan is the closest relative and substitutes cleanly, cup for cup.
- Powdered fine in a mortarThe recipe does ask for a fine powder, and pounding also bruises the nuts so their oil bleeds into the custard. Short pulses in a food processor come close; a long grind turns oily nuts to paste.
- Toast firstThe original skips it, but five to eight minutes in a 350F oven deepens the flavor of hickory or pecan considerably. Cool the nuts before they go into the cream.
- SugarOne and three-quarters cupfuls for a quart and a half of dairy is sweet by modern taste but not extravagant — sugar also keeps the ice cream scoopable. Reducing it much below a cup and a half will tend to give a harder block.
- Freezing"Then freeze" assumes a crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, turned twenty to thirty minutes. In a modern machine, churn in two batches — the volume here is too large for most home canisters — then harden two hours in the freezer.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts finished, serving twelve to sixteen.
Hickory nuts were a free ingredient across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, gathered in autumn and cracked through the winter, which is why they turn up so often in nineteenth-century American baking and confectionery while barely appearing in English books of the same date. The shells are thick and the meats sit in awkward chambers, so picking them out was slow work — the sort of labor a cookbook could assume for free. Ice cream remained special-occasion food, dependent on an ice supply and on somebody willing to turn a crank for half an hour, and a nut-flavored version counted as a refinement rather than a thrift measure. Twentieth Century Cook Book belongs to the wave of American household compendiums published around the turn of the century, by which time commercial ice delivery had made frozen desserts practical in ordinary town kitchens.