Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making

Four. The Land of Ice Cream

four The Land of Ice Cream 75 England lagged behind the continent in ice cream making, and America lagged behind England. In America, until well after the Revolutionary War, ice cream was a rarity. Pastry chefs and confectioners were few and far between.Ice for freezing was not always available and was difficult to store, even for those who had icehouses. Sugar was expensive. Making ice cream was also,as we know,a physically taxing,time-consuming job. Even wealthy households with servants seldom served ice cream. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that ice cream was available to the average American, and even then it was a special treat. In the mid-eighteenth century,simply eating ice cream was such an unusual pleasure that those who did have it often mentioned it in their journals and letters. When Maryland governor Thomas Bladen and his wife served ice cream at a dinner in 1744, one of the guests, William Black, wrote in his journal that the dinner was most elegant; it included a great variety of dishes, “after which came a Dessert no less Curious; Among the Rarities of which it was Compos’d, was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously.”1 In Italy or France, a table covered with trompe l’oeil ices was worth mentioning. In America, a simple dish of ice cream was noteworthy. America’s founding families enjoyed ice cream. After the Revolutionary War ended, George Washington bought a “Cream Machine for Making Ice.” Thomas Jefferson’s papers include eight recipes written in his own hand,one of which is for vanilla ice cream.On the other side of the paper, he wrote out a recipe for biscuit de Savoy, a cookie he liked to eat with his ice cream. He probably wrote the recipes sometime after his diplomatic service in Paris in the late 1780s. This is one of the first ice cream recipes written by an American. ICE CREAM 2.bottles of good cream. 6.yolks of eggs. 1 ⁄ 2lb.sugar mix the yolks & sugar put the cream on a fire in a casserole,first putting in a stick of Vanilla. when near boiling take it off & pour it gently into the mixture of eggs & sugar. stir it well. put it on the fire again stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent its sticking to the casserole. when near boiling take it off and strain it thro’ a towel. put it in the Sabottiere [sic] then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served.put into the ice a handful of salt. put salt on the coverlid of the Sabotiere & cover the whole with ice. leave it still half a quarter of an hour. then turn the Sabotiere in the ice 10 minutes open it to loosen with a spatula the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere. shut it & replace it in the ice open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides when well taken (prise) stir it well with the Spatula. put it in moulds,justling it well down on the knee. then put the mould into the same bucket of ice. leave it there to the moment of serving it. to withdraw it,immerse the mould in warm water,turning it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate.2 76 / The Land of Ice Cream Jefferson could have found recipes for ice cream in English or European cookbooks of the day, but not in an American one. No American cookbooks were published until the end of the eighteenth century,and the first ones had no recipes for ice cream.The dearth of cookbooks is not remarkable , since only about one hundred books a year were published in America before 1842, when advances in printing technology revolutionized the industry.But many people brought cookbooks by authors such as Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Raffald with them to America, and reprints of English books were published in America in the eighteenth century.An American edition of the English Art of Cookery by Richard Briggs, published in Philadelphia in 1792 with the title The New Art of Cookery, was one of the first to include a recipe for ice cream. However, it was Raffald’s recipe, though he did not attribute the recipe to her any more...