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Ginger Ice Cream
(England.) Mix on the fire 6 ounces of sugar, rind of a lemon, and yolks of 6 eggs. Add 1 1/2 pints of boiling cream, and stir until it is thick. Add 2 ounces of chopped preserved ginger, mixed with a spoonful of rum, and pounded. Stir for a while, then strain; freeze it 3 hours. Serve it with sponge cakes or jumbles.
A straightforward boiled custard base, flavoured with lemon peel and preserved ginger, written for a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer. The only real difficulty is the order of operations, which the original garbles.
- The hinge: don't scramble itSix yolks with 1 1/2 pints of boiling cream will curdle if the cream goes in fast or the pan runs hot. Temper the cream into the yolk-sugar mixture in a slow stream and cook over gentle heat to 175-180F, when it coats a spoon; the instruction to "stir until it is thick" means exactly that and no further.
- MeasuresIf the pints are English ones of 20 fluid ounces, 1 1/2 pints is 30 fl oz, about 3 3/4 US cups; read as American pints of 16 fl oz it is 24 fl oz, or 3 cups. Six ounces of sugar is a little under a cup by volume. Two ounces of ginger is a scant 1/4 cup once chopped.
- Strain before you add the gingerAs written you would sieve out the ginger you just pounded in. Strain the finished custard to catch the lemon rind and any threads of cooked egg, then stir the rum-soaked pounded ginger into the strained base so the pieces survive into the frozen cream.
- Preserved gingerThis is stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars, or crystallised. Drain it before chopping; crystallised ginger works but adds noticeable extra sugar. Fresh root ginger is not a substitute here; the flavour is quite different.
- "Freeze it 3 hours"That is the time for a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, mostly spent hardening. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first, churn 20-30 minutes, then firm it in the freezer for two to three hours.
- The rumA spoonful is there for flavour and to loosen the pounded ginger, but alcohol lowers the freezing point. Keep it to one tablespoon or the ice cream will stay slack.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. Jumbles are crisp sugar cookies, usually shaped as rings or knots; any plain dry biscuit or sponge finger serves the same purpose of giving the soft ice something to lean on.
Ginger ice cream was a standard of English confectioners through the nineteenth century, when preserved ginger arrived in stoneware jars from Canton and was a fixture of the well-stocked store cupboard — sweet, hot, and expensive enough to be worth showing off in a dessert. The custard here is the classic English boiled base, and the lemon rind steeped in the hot cream is an older trick for perfuming milk before vanilla extract became cheap. The "(England.)" tag suggests the book gathers dishes by country of origin, marking this one as a specimen of national cookery for American readers; the pairing with sponge cakes or jumbles reflects the period habit of accompanying an ice with something to eat alongside it.