Ice cream is an inalienable American right, as close as we come to one single, undivided national appetite. The initial shock of ice cream against the tip of the tongue is a mark of American childhood. In the eighteenth century, the dessert was a rare and labor-intensive luxury. But time and technology eventually delivered the “frozen dainty” to Main Street. Indeed, ice cream was the first taste of America offered to immigrants at Ellis Island. Americans each consume an average of 22½ quarts of ice cream a year.
Thomas Jefferson’s Vanilla Ice Cream
When a group of Virginia statesmen stopped at the home of Maryland’s colonial governor on their way to negotiate a treaty with the Iroquois nation in 1744, they were served an iced cream made from milk and strawberries. William Black, one of the guests, described the dish as a “dessert no less Curious,” a rarity that he said “eats most Deliciously.” Within twenty years, Giovanni Bosio had opened the nation’s first gelateria in New York City, and by the summer of 1790, another merchant reported that President George Washington spent about $200 on ice cream for afternoon gatherings. But it was not until Thomas Jefferson served as secretary of state that ice-cream making entered the national lexicon. In his diary, Jefferson noted that “snow gives the most delicate flavor to creams, but ice is the most powerful congealer and lasts longer” and provided a recipe for a rich, custard-based “French Style” ice cream. This version of the original has been updated for modern ice-cream freezers
8 cups heavy cream
1 vanilla bean, split in half
6 large egg yolks
1 cup sugar
1. Combine the heavy cream and vanilla bean in a heavy-bottomed pot. Place over medium heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring often, for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.
2. Whisk the egg yolks and the sugar together until thick and light yellow, 5 to 6 minutes with a handheld whisk, 3 to 4 minutes with an electric mixer. While still whisking, add 1 cup of the hot cream to the yolk mixture in a slow, steady stream. Then gradually stir the egg mixture into the remaining cream. Continue stirring until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 5 minutes. Set aside for 10 minutes.
3. Line a fine-mesh strainer with cheesecloth and moisten with warm water. Pour the custard mixture through the strainer and into a bowl. Discard the vanilla bean, stir the mixture, cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to 12 hours. Freeze according to the instructions on your ice cream freezer, transfer to a mold or container, and freeze for 1 hour before serving.
MAKES 2½ QUARTS
From France to Philly–Via the White House
In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia, with its public ice cream gardens, was the center of the ice-cream universe, and many accounts say that Augustus Jackson, an African-American candy maker who had worked as a chef in the White House, was the emperor of Philadelphia ice cream. Making the confection was still an arduous task. Large blocks of ice were harvested from rivers in the winter and stored in straw for the summer treat. An 1894 article in the New York Times claimed that Mr. Jackson invented a method for beating more air into the frozen egg and cream custards. The results were so toothsome that his ice cream fetched $1 a quart and, said the Times, “It immediately became popular, and the inventor soon enlarged his store, and when he died left a considerable fortune. A good many tried to follow his example, and ice cream was hawked about the streets, being wheeled along very much as the hokey-pokey carts are now, but none of them succeeded in obtaining the flavor that Jackson had in his product.”
Other accounts maintain that Mr. Jackson wholesaled his ice cream to the city’s ice-cream gardens, many of which were owned by African Americans. During Mr. Jackson’s reign, “French style vanilla ice cream” was rechristened and became “Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream.”
President Roosevelt’s secretary accepts an ice cream cake from the International Association of Ice Cream Manufacturers.
Before she married James Madison, Dolley Payne Todd served as the hostess for many of Thomas Jefferson’s gatherings at the White House and became as famous for her lavish fêtes as she did for her elaborately molded ice creams. The pink tower of strawberry ice cream that she served on a silver platter at her husband’s second inaugural ball in 1812 captured the public imagination and ice cream became de rigueur at fashionable parties. In one account Augustus Jackson prepared the pink tower using cream from Madison’s dairy in Montpelier and strawberries from Dolley’s garden at the White House.
Strawberry Buttermilk Sherbet
CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA
The richest old-fashioned ice cream was generally made with a custard, but modern versions tend to be heavier on the fruit, lighter on the dairy, almost like sherbet, said Bill Smith, the chef at Crooks Corner. This recipe from his friend Donna Florio is a perfect example: The buttermilk gives a clean, bright flavor to the ripest fruit to create an intense strawberry flavor and deep pink color.
2 cups ripe strawberries, rinsed and hulled, or one 16-ounce package frozen strawberries
2 cups sugar
2 cups buttermilk
½ vanilla bean, scraped or 1 teaspoon high quality vanilla extract
1. Place ½ cup of the strawberries in a food processor and pulse until smooth. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer and set aside. Discard the solids and place the fruit in a bowl with the sugar, buttermilk, and vanilla; stir. Roughly chop the remaining strawberries and add to the mixture. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Pour the strawberry mixture into the freezer container of a 1½-quart electric ice-cream maker, and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. (Instructions and times may vary.) Garnish, if desired.
MAKES 1 QUART
Children making ice cream for a church benefit.
Technology
The cost of ice and the labor required to freeze cream flawlessly ensured that only the wealthy could indulge in the stuff. It took three servants to freeze the cream—two turned the freezing canister in its ice bath and another scraped the cream from the sides of the canister as it froze.
“It is the practice with some indolent cooks, to set the freezer, containing the cream, in a tub with ice and salt, and put it in the ice-house; it will certainly freeze there, but not until the watery particles have subsided, and by the separation destroyed the cream,” wrote Mary Randolph in The Virginia Housewife. But in the early 1840s, Nancy M. Johnson mounted a one-woman revolution in ice cream. She attached a crank and a handle to the side of a metal canister, placed the canister in a wooden bucket of ice, and turned icing cream into a one-person job.
Opinion is divided as to where this bit of practical magic occurred—New Jersey, Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia. Lacking the funds to manufacture her invention, Mrs. Johnson sold her patent two years later. Some say it fetched $200, others $2,000, but there is no disputing that the device patented in 1843 is still in use today. It was also built to giant scale to be powered by horses, and turned ice cream from a homemade treat into a manufacturing industry.
Today American consumers spend $8.1 billion a year on home purchases of ice cream, but $13.3 billion on ice cream eaten away from home—at restaurants diners, snack bars, ice cream stands, the ballpark, and the beach.
Owen E. Williams, who discovered how to preserve sweet cream indefinitely with sodium chloride, HARRIS & EWING, 1939.
Early Prohibitionists were concerned by how easily soda water could conceal the addition of booze and by its similarity to champagne. By the 1880s a number of municipalities had banned the sale of the suspicious substance on Sunday. This wreaked havoc on the ice cream soda business. Some enterprising soda fountain owner hit on the idea of offering a soda-free ice cream soda—ice cream with chocolate sauce and whipped cream—on Sunday. The first ice cream Sunday may have been served in Evanston, Illinois, in 1890, or the next year in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, or in 1893 at Platt & Cole’s drugstore in Ithaca, New York. Most likely, gilding the ice cream lily was a food concept with multiple points of entry—another example of how good things get better (or at least bigger and richer) in the United States. George Giffy, a soda fountain owner in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, changed the name to the ice cream sundae.
Janet Cheechuck’s Hot Fudge Sauce
GORDONSVILLE, VIRGINIA
For the past thirty years, Janet Cheerchuck and her husband, Steve Shifflett, have raised orchids, a flower nearly as fussy and almost as satisfying as a perfect hot fudge sundae. A baker and a cook, Ms. Cheerchuck gathers recipes from the chefs in Washington, D.C., while delivering orchids to their restaurant. This perfect fudge sauce is an amalgam of several chefs’ recipes and the result of years of striving to make the best sundae in the world.
12 ounces unsweetened chocolate
12 ounces sweet butter
2 cups boiling water
4 cups sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1½ ounces dark rum
½ ounce triple sec
1. Melt chocolate and butter over hot water in a double boiler until the ingredients are fully incorporated and the chocolate looks shiny. Use a spatula to scrape the melted chocolate into a heavy stainless-steel saucepan and add the rest of the ingredients, except the vanilla, rum, and triple sec.
2. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, then cover and boil without stirring for 8 to 9 minutes, or until the sauce reaches 230°F on a candy thermometer.
3. When the sauce has cooled , add vanilla, rum, and triple sec.
Nancy Silverton’s Salted Caramel and Peanut Sundae
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Nancy Silverton, the founder of La Brea Bakery and the pastry chef and coowner of Campanile Restaurant, ignited the twentieth-century artisanal bread movement in the United States. Having introduced dishes such as the panna cotta that she had in Italy to the United States, Ms. Silverton has a sixth sense for inventing sweets that make Americans swoon. Sundaes are a “no-brainer, everybody loves a sundae,” she says, but “there are going to be lots of very firm opinions about any dish that is so universally loved.” This combination of two of her favorite things, caramel and peanuts, is Cracker Jack for connoisseurs—salty and sweet, warm and cold, crunchy and smooth, and deeply connected to memories of American childhood.
CARAMEL ICE CREAM
1 vanilla bean, cut in halve lengthwise
2¼ cups sugar
4 cups milk
3 cups heavy whipping cream
20 egg yolks
1 cup crème fraîche
1. Scrape vanilla bean seeds into a large pot and add pod halves. Add the sugar and melt, stirring gently and constantly, over medium-high heat until the sugar liquefies and turns dark caramel. Slowly add the milk and the whipping cream, stirring constantly. Bring the mixture to a boil, remove from the heat, and let stand for 30 minutes.
2. Place the yolks in a bowl and whisk. Return the caramel mixture to a boil. Whisking constantly, ladle a little of the hot cream mixture over the eggs and continue adding and whisking until the two mixtures are combined. Whisk in the crème fraîche. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a separate bowl and continue whisking until cool. Chill for 1 hour in the refrigerator and freeze in the ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Serve with salty peanut caramel sauce (see recipe below).
MAKES ½ GALLON
SALTY PEANUT CARAMEL SAUCE
2¾ cups unsalted, unroasted, peeled peanuts, ideally Virginia nuts (1 pound)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon salt
1 large plump or 2 thin vanilla beans, split lengthwise
1¾ cups heavy whipping cream
½ cup (1 stick) butter
½ cup corn syrup
1½ cups sugar
1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Toss together peanuts, peanut oil, and salt in a small bowl. Spread the peanuts on a baking sheet and discard any excess salt. Toast at 325°F until lightly colored, about 10 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside.
2. Scrape the vanilla bean seeds into a small saucepan, then add pod halves. Add the cream and butter and heat over medium heat until butter melts. Remove from heat and set aside.
3. Heat the corn syrup in a 2-quart saucepan over medium-high heat until it begins to bubble. Begin stirring syrup slowly and continuously and sprinkle in sugar in about 4 batches, waiting until each batch of sugar is incorporated into syrup before adding more. (Don’t stir too fast or sugar won’t color.) Continue cooking and stirring slowly until mixture is thin, bubbly, and straw-colored. (Don’t let sauce get brown at this point.)
4. Remove the syrup from the heat and slowly add half of cream-butter mixture. The caramel will boil up; allow it to settle, then stir to incorporate ingredients. Repeat with remaining cream-butter mixture.
5. Return the caramel to medium-high heat and boil until sauce has thickened and darkened slightly, about 2 minutes. Stir in peanuts, but not any clumps of salt that may have fallen onto baking sheet. Boil slightly longer if color is not dark enough; sauce should be pale brown, not medium or dark brown. Remove vanilla bean pods and serve over ice cream.
MAKES 1 QUART
“You, icy sweetness of strawberry, chocolate or vanilla, melting, stickily into your inverted dunce cap, ravisher of appetites, leading the younger generation from the straight and narrow paths of spinach, pilferer of the pennies that might go to make a fortune; destroyer of the peace of homes, instrument of bribery and reward of virtue.”
—H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1928
We All Scream
Nearly every Great American Ice Cream Empire sprang from a small ice cream shop, pushcart, or truck. Sold in England prior to 1904, the edible, grab-gobble-and-go cone was introduced to Americans at the St. Louis World’s Fair that year. Historians believe that more than fifty vendors sold ice cream cones at the fair.
1920 Prohibition reduced legal alcohol consumption and raised the amount of ice cream eaten in the country by 100 million gallons. Harry Burt, who owned an ice cream store in Youngstown, Ohio, invented the Good Humor Ice Cream Sucker with its chocolate coating, and wooden stick. The motorized trucks made him the first nationwide ice cream baron.
1925 When Howard Deering Johnson found that the soda fountain was the most profitable section of his drugstore, he offered three flavors—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry—using his mother’s ice cream recipe, which was higher in butterfat than most. By 1950, Howard Johnson’s offered 28 flavors and had 400 locations across the country.
AUGUST 4, 1938 John Fremont “Grandpa” McCullough and his son, Alex McCullough, talked their friend Herb Noble into selling all-you-can-eat bowls of their invention—soft-serve ice cream—at his ice-cream store. Two years later, the three men opened the first Dairy Queen in Joliet, Illinois. The first food business to offer independent franchises, the company has 5,900 stores around the world today.
1953 Burt Baskin and Irvine Robbins opened an ice cream parlor in Glendale, California. At the suggestion of their Madison Avenue advertising agency, the partners offered 31 flavors—a new flavor for each day of the month and more flavors than Howard Johnson’s—with the slogan “Count the Flavors. Where Flavor Counts.” Today there are 5,800 Baskin-Robbins outlets around the world.
1960 Reuben Mattus founded Häagen-Dazs, a high-butterfat ice cream made with all natural ingredients. The nonsensical name was meant to evoke old world quality, but the ice cream was made at a small factory in the Bronx and shipped via Greyhound buses to college students across the country. Mattus and his widowed mother had immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s and sold frozen ices from a horse-drawn cart in the Bronx. In 1983 the company was sold to General Mills for $70 million.
1978 After completing a correspondence course in ice cream making, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, opened an ice cream parlor in a former gas station in Burlington, Vermont. Like Häagen-Daz, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was high butterfat, but instead of old world tradition, the owners created tie-died improvisations such as Chubby Hubby and Rain Forest Crunch by mixing candy and even cookie dough into the ice cream and then marketed the flavors with a leftie social conscience. To sell their ice cream they used campaigns such as an annual free cone day and drove a truck painted like a cow—the cow mobile—across the country. They got it placed on the space shuttle and used it to build the world’s largest baked Alaska in Washington to protest global warming. Through their foundation they pushed corporate giving and good works to new levels. In 2000 the company was acquired by Unilever for $326 million.
Adria Shimada’s Raspberry Sorbet
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
Although she trained to be a pastry chef, Adria Shimada wanted to make ice cream. “Every time I eat ice cream I feel like a child again,” said the founder and owner of Parfait, one of the nation’s only all-organic, all-local ice cream trucks. “I love my business because my business is about making people happy. There is a general, cultural love of ice cream and the ice cream truck in the United States, and if you add ice cream made from the very best ingredients, you are basically serving little bowls of sunshine. I just love to watch how happy it makes people. As long as you find really ripe, high quality ingredients, the sorbet itself is easy to make.” And this one has a particularly fetching texture.
1 pound (about 2 cups) fresh, ripe raspberries (I get mine from the Alm Hill organic farm)
½ cup water
¾ cup cane sugar
Juice of 1 lemon, preferably Meyer lemon
1. Wash the raspberries. In a heavy-bottomed nonreactive pot, combine the raspberries and water over medium-high heat and cook until the berries have broken apart—5 to 7 minutes—stirring occasionally. The mixture can bubble up a little, but don’t overcook. Remove from the heat and stir in sugar and lemon juice. Cool for 30 minutes and then refrigerate at least 4 hours or overnight.
2. Freeze in an ice cream machine according to the manufacturer’s instructions. If the ice cream machine has variable speeds, churn at higher speed to create a smoother, less icy texture. Transfer the sorbet to a separate container and put in the regular freezer overnight.
MAKES 1 QUART
People’s Pops: Peach, Chamomile, and Honey Pops
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Nathalie Jordi, Joel Horowitz, and David Carrell, food lovers and farmers’ market devotees, are not the sort to suffer a steamy day in the city. Suspecting that they were not alone, the high school pals began to fashion Popsicles from local ingredients and sell them at a flea market in Brooklyn several years ago. Today they field requests for interviews from business school professors and other would-be entrepreneurs. “It’s not like we had a plan,” said Ms. Jordi, “we just wanted something delicious and cold.” Their grown-up combinations—anise-spiced rhubarb, blackberry and lemon verbena, plum and tarragon, raspberry and cream, and this recipe for peach, honey, and chamomile—are better than the frosty pops of childhood. Way, way better.
4 tree-ripened yellow peaches
2 white peaches (slightly soft)
¼ cup fresh honey
Juice of ½ small lemon
Pinch of kosher salt
1 bouquet fresh chamomile flowers
1. Rinse, halve, and pit two-thirds of the peaches, and puree them with the skin on until the mixture is almost smooth. Add the honey, lemon juice, salt, and three finely minced chamomile flowers into the pureed peaches.
2. Coarsely chop remaining one-third of peaches and combine with puree. Add honey to taste. Make the pops a tad sweeter than you want them to be, because they lose a little sweetness after freezing. Pour into 3-ounce Dixie cups or Popsicle molds, add wooden Popsicle sticks, and freeze for at least 2 hours.
MAKES 10 POPS
Roy’s Chocolate Ice Cream with Chocolate “Rags”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
⅓ cup sugar
⅓ cup cocoa powder (preferably Valrhona)
1 cup milk
2 cups heavy cream
6 large egg yolks
⅓ cup honey
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
Sanitary Ice Cream Cone Company, Lewis Hine, 1917.
“My advice is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while its on your plate.”
—Thornton Wilder
1. Fill a large bowl with ice and water and set a smaller bowl into it. Put the sugar and cocoa in a large saucepan. Add the milk gradually, stirring until the cocoa is dissolved. Stir in the cream and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
2. While the cream mixture is heating, combine the yolks, honey, and salt in a large bowl. Whisk until the yolks are light and tripled in volume.
3. When the cream mixture is at a full rolling boil, pour it into the lightened yolks and whisk for 1 minute. Strain into the bowl set over ice and cool completely, stirring when you remember to. Stir in the vanilla. If you’ve planned ahead, chill in the refrigerator overnight. Otherwise, when the ice-cream base is cool, freeze in an ice-cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions.
4. Melt the bittersweet chocolate in a bowl over barely simmering water or in the microwave with 30-second blasts. Transfer to a small zipper-top plastic bag. When the ice cream is nearly done, snip a corner off the bag and slowly pipe the chocolate into the ice cream as it churns. Transfer the ice cream to a plastic container, cover, and put in the freezer for at least 2 hours before serving.
MAKES ABOUT 1 QUART
Jeni’s Awesome Dirt Road Ice Cream
COLUMBUS, OHIO
When she was studying art at Ohio State University, Jeni Britton Bauer began to work in the kitchen of Le Chatelaine, a French pastry store and bistro in Columbus, and a strange thing happened. “I stopped painting, I stopped making art. All I could think about was ice gream. started to look at food as potential ice cream. The mint in the backyard, corn from the farmstand, pumpkins, lavender. Basically ice cream became my art, and we were too young to know any better, so a friend and I opened a little stand in the old covered market.” It took about ten years of learning the hard way before Ms. Britton learned to hit the sweet spot between art and commerce. Her salty caramel ice cream changed the way Columbus thought about sundaes and cones, and her Dirt Road Ice Cream—dark milk chocolate ice cream with a swirl of smoked almonds—has remained the bestseller as she and her partner and husband, Charly Bauer, have expanded to seven small stores in central Ohio. The growth of her business pleases residents of the small organic dairy Ms. Bauer has partnered with. The best cream in the heartland, after all, deserves nothing less than some of the best ice cream in America.
1 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon cornstarch
2 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1 cup evaporated milk
¼ cup heavy cream
⅔ cup sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
8 ounces smoked almonds, chopped coarsely
1. Mix about 2 tablespoons of milk with the cornstarch in a small bowl to make a smooth slurry. Chop the chocolate and place in a medium bowl. Fill a large bowl with ice and water.
2. Combine the remaining milk, evaporated milk, heavy cream, sugar, and corn syrup in a 4-quart saucepan and bring to a rolling boil over medium-high heat. Add the cocoa, whisking until it is incorporated, and continue boiling for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat. Gradually whisk the hot milk mixture into the chocolate. Add salt and stir until melted and incorporated. Pour the mixture into a bowl that can fit an ice bath and stir until completely cold.
3. Pour the mixture into ice cream freezer and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When the ice cream is frozen, layer it into a storage container with thin layers of smoked almonds between each layer. Reserve some of the smoked almonds to garnish individual serves.
MAKES 1 QUART
