The Pineapple Encore

This is actually one of the themes I suggested for the  52 Weeks of Ice Cream , so I didn’t want to let myself down for it! I am not the first person to make parmesan ice cream in recent times, early on in my historic ice cream explorations I wondered if anyone had done this and so encountered the marvellous  Max Miller of Tasting History . Every Tuesday, I look forward to his new video, and I would encourage everyone with a vague interest in food or history to check his channel out.  Parmesan ice cream is included in Nutt’s book, although this wouldn’t be Pineapple Encore if I didn’t attempt some modifications to how I’m doing it. Seeing as this is savoury week, I decided to make the ice cream less sweet than usual. Now, you can’t just leave sugar out of an ice cream, people try to do it, and inevitably ask the question ‘why did my ice cream freeze so hard?’ The answer is precisely because of the lack of sugar. Sugar holds on to water and in doing so softens the ice crea...

When I started making historic ice creams, my friend was dubious because, in her words, “If the Victorians had perfected ice cream, then we’d still be making it that way.” I suspect the reason we don’t still make ice cream the way the Victorians did is because it is blooming expensive. I made some lovely vanilla ice cream using about £15 of vanilla pods and thought that was expensive, but it doesn’t even come close to cederata ice cream. First of all, I had a bit of a time figuring out what cederata is (or, as it turns out, what cederatas are.) It’s an outdated term now, and was possibly even outdated then because the only references I could find were from Frederick Nutt. He left a couple of clues though, in directing the reader to the Italian warehouses and, in another book of his called The Imperial and Royal Cook, he said “if you have not (cederatas) grate a lemon in it.” After excluding the results that suggested it was cedarwood oil (because I don’t really want to eat a pine fores...

For some reason, I had a lot of problems getting it straight what exactly Jack Frost is doing in The Christmas Song: he would variously be nipping at your toes, knocking at your door and, on one memorable occasion, roasting on an open fire. That’s what the chestnuts are doing, although my chestnuts came pre-roasted (and, needless to say, de-husked.) Chestnuts form the base of my ice cream for the ‘winter wonderland’; they’ve fallen out of favour as a winter snack now, but they’re in the song for a reason and you can still get roasted chestnuts from stands, albeit mostly at Victorian Christmas markets. There are some interesting measurements in the Gunter’s confectioners’ books. My personal favourite is from Nutt’s plain ice cream recipe that called for “ as much powdered sugar as will lay on half-a-crown ”; having mislaid my half-a-crown, I favoured the more precise 6 ounces from Jarrin and Jeanes (Jeanes actually said 5 to 6.) Jeanes, however, included 2 pints of chestnuts in their hu...

As I mentioned in  my first ever post , I’m an ice cream tinkerer. I got an ice cream machine in the same way I get most of my kitchen equipment: my mum bought it and then never used it, and eventually my dad clearing things out defeated her (and my - it must be genetic!) tendency towards hoarding, and it was given to me.  I really enjoyed making ice cream, but ended up bored down the rabbit hole of stabilisers and skimmed milk powder. I realised one day, why am I trying to make Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? I could go and buy that. So now, to paraphrase Wonka (love that film, I saw it four times with various people, it’s the softest thing I’ve ever seen), I make ice cream like no other, because if it were I wouldn’t bother. I went back to recipes from before additives and flavour essences, and eventually found what I call the Gunter’s confectioners: Frederick Nutt, William Jarrin, William Jeanes. Over a span of about 80 years in the Georgian and Victorian eras, they all worked...

On a reddit called  52 Weeks of Ice Cream , the aim is (unsurprisingly) to make 52 ice creams in 2024, following a weekly theme. As I’m essentially an ice cream tinkerer and newly armed with a fancy ice cream machine, this appealed greatly, and so here we are.  The first theme is ‘basics’ and what would be more basic than making what is literally my base ice cream? It only uses three ingredients (and two of those are variants of each other) and instructions that are essentially ‘weigh’ and ‘mix’. I made 600g but I do everything in ice cream by percentages, and I’ve given those too so you can make any amount you like. Ingredients: 340.2g single (19% fat) cream (56.7%) 139.2g whipping (39% fat) cream (23.2%) 120.6g caster sugar* (20.1%) * Caster sugar seems to be a UK thing; it’s very fine granulated sugar, different to powdered/confectioner’s/icing sugar in that it has nothing else added to it; granulated sugar will work instead, or could be ground down to make DIY caster sugar...