Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making

Two. Crème de la Cream

two Crème de la Cream 26 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France set the style in upper-class European dining and in the making of ices and ice creams. In fact, the first book completely dedicated to ice cream was written by a Frenchman,Monsieur (first name unknown) Emy,and published in Paris in 1768. French cookbooks were being translated and distributed in England , Holland,Denmark,Sweden,and Italy.Traveling chefs were disseminating the French culinary repertoire. Employing a French cook was the height of fashion, and well-to-do families in England, Russia, and Italy vied for them. In Sicily, they were called monzu, a word derived from monsieur . Although revolution and upheaval lay ahead on the political front, the empire of French haute cuisine was growing,and its influence was expanding . François Massialot was one of the most influential French chefs of the time.Born in 1660,he cooked for many of France’s nobles and was the author of Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois and Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures , les liqueurs, et les fruits, both of which were updated and reissued several times. His combined works were translated into English and published as The Court and Country Cook in 1702, and Le cuisinier roïal et bourgeois was translated into Italian in 1741. Clearly, he was a man of some importance. Yet,like everyone else,Massialot had to contend with the realities of ice cream making. It was still a difficult and laborious process. Nearly every ingredient that was needed presented a problem of one kind or another. The ice business was not yet widely established,so obtaining and storing ice was still expensive. Salt was costly. Sugar had to be purified before it was used. In an era without refrigeration, milk and cream often curdled and eggs were not always fresh. Cooks like Massialot stressed the importance of tasting ingredients such as cream to make sure they were still fresh before pouring them into a mixture and ruining it. Since the water supply was also of concern, Massialot noted that the water should come from a spring or a river and be very clear.In addition,the utensils used for making ices had not changed in any appreciable way since Latini’s and Audiger’s time. Confectioners also had to be frugal. In explaining the process of freezing ices, Massialot wrote, “You’ll find this expensive because of the salt.” Until modern times, common salt was not so common. The gabelle, or salt tax, was one of the most hated and inequitable taxes in France.1 The gabelle’s greatest burden fell to the peasants,but even an elite confectioner like Massialot could not afford to waste salt. He recommended that, after making ices, confectioners should collect the water from the melted ice and boil it to reclaim the dissolved salt.He said that the salt could be used several more times by repeating the process each time they made ice cream. Years later, the Italian government’s monopolistic salt policy, too, turned this basic necessity into an expensive luxury.In 1891,in the first cookbook written in Italian for the home cook,the monumental La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (translated into English as Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well),author Pellegrino Artusi wrote in his introduction to making ice creams:“To save money you can re-use the salt by drying it out on the fire,thus evaporating the water that had resulted from the freezing process.”2 The 1716 edition of Massialot’s Nouvelle instruction began, as so many other books of confectionery would in years to come, with a chapter on sugar: how to select it, clarify it, and cook it to the different stages required for different types of confections. When Massialot was writing, sugar was becoming more available and affordable as a result of the use of slave labor on plantations in the French Caribbean colonies. However, Crème de la Cream / 27 it was sold in solid loaves that had to be crushed; and it contained impurities , so it had to be clarified before being used.Massialot recommended choosing the whitest and most beautiful sugar possible because it would be easier to work with than brown sugar. But, he pointed out, even the whitest...