Week Twelve: Spring

I’ve been talking about the three Gunter’s confectioners - Frederick Nutt, William Jarrin, William Jeanes. There are at least three others who wrote books, but for one reason for another I’ve largely dismissed them. One should have been the most credible, it was The Confectioner's Oracle and it was by William Gunter - that’s right, Gunter. He was the son of the owner of Gunter’s, but his book reads like a parody and provides little of use. The Kitchen Oracle by Samuel Hobbs is a) hard - and expensive - to find and b) seems to be essentially a menu list, recipes are in there but would be difficult to catalogue.

The last is by Robert Abbot and is called The Housekeeper’s Valuable Present. I largely dismissed it because it’s a mix of too vague to be used and being much the same as Nutt’s recipe … except in one important area to me: the use of jams in ice creams. Jarrin and Jeanes didn’t even touch on this subject. Nutt included a jam alternate recipe for most if not all of the fruit ice creams, but try as I might I couldn’t make them work (I was experimenting with them before I started this blog, very early on in my trials of historic ice cream recipes.) They mostly involve taking ‘a spoonful’ of jam, but that’s not a unit of measurement. What spoon was he using - was it a teaspoon or a ladle? (He also often included ground almond in his jam recipes; unless you enjoy a grainy texture, I’d suggest don’t. He was probably trying to get at what we’d probably used almond essence for now, to enhance the fruit taste.) Abbot solves the jam problem by having actual measurements, generally six ounces of jam gets three quarters of a pint of cream, so two ounces for every quarter of a pint or, because I generally work in pints of cream, eight ounces of jam. Eight ounces is a lot more than a spoonful, and is actually a workable amount; in my early experiments a spoonful got me about 50g of jam, this is between four and five times more than that. 

Jams would have been different to the Gunter’s confectioners than they are to us. For a start, commercial jams available to us almost always use pectin. Pectin is a stabiliser in ice cream; it’s not the best or most commonly used one, but it is one. I don’t believe stabilisers are some evil ingredient; pectin comes from citrus peel so any of my citrus based ice creams have some albeit low amounts of pectin, in much the way that any of my custard based ice creams have an emulsifier in the form of the lecithin in egg yolk. But what the Gunter’s confectioners didn’t do was add stabilisers that weren’t part of the recipe anyway, which the pectin in jam would be when you consider their jam recipes only included the fruit and the sugar, in nearly equal measures. On that note, another difference is how much sugar were in the jams. I’ve mentioned before that if we think there’s a lot of sugar included in foods today, the Gunter’s confectioners could give us a run for our money. I ended up with a jam that was basically two thirds sugar. There was some variation in the proportions used for jams between the Gunter’s confectioners, and also between types of fruit used, but as the jam ice cream recipes were from Nutt I decided to follow his jam recipes too.

The irony of this week’s ice cream is I’m making forced rhubarb jam ice cream. Forced rhubarb, as the name implies, is rhubarb that has been forced to grow out of season so that we can pick it when its all sweet and pink rather than getting fibrous and green later in the season. Forced rhubarb actually has an interesting history starting in the 1870s, and was once upon a time in the UK and Europe a very lucrative business. Why is this ironic, you ask? Because Nutt (and Abbot) would have used jams so he could use out of season fruits. I’m making a jam - a fruit preserve - out of a fruit that is famously known for being forced to grow out of season and therefore didn’t need preserving. And please don’t tell me rhubarb is a vegetable; it is, in the same way that tomatoes are fruits. 

Ingredients for the rhubarb jam

Equal amounts of forced rhubarb, cut into small pieces (about 1.5-2cm long), and caster sugar

A bit like for the Guinness ice cream, I’d suggest work out how much jam you need first, unless you want to make a lot of rhubarb jam. You lose about half the weight of the rhubarb in the jam making process. You’re going to make a jam that is roughly two thirds sugar, so if you know how much jam you need, add a bit more as room for error (between 50g and 100g more, I’d suggest), divide it by three, multiply that by two and you have how much you want of each ingredient.

For example, if you want 230g of rhubarb jam, round it to 300g, divide by three get you 100g, multiply by two and you want 200g each of forced rhubarb and caster sugar.

Method for the rhubarb jam 

1. Put the chopped forced rhubarb and caster sugar in a saucepan. 

2. Apply heat and stir constantly; it will look very unpromising at this stage, don’t worry. 

3. As the rhubarb softens and the water is released, the jam will change texture and thicken. During this process, turn down the heat; you want to end up on about half the starting heat.

4. When it takes about two seconds for a spoonful of the jam mixture to fall off the spoon, and no large pieces of rhubarb remain, the jam is ready.

5. Put into a jar and allow to cool; use an ice bath to bring it down to 20C before refrigerating for best food safety.

Ingredients for the ice cream

I made the amount of mixture for ‘a pint of cream’ but use the percentages and make as much as you want; I’d actually suggest making more, for reasons you’ll see in a bit.

484.53g single (19% butterfat) cream (52.39%)

93.5g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (10.11%)

119.95g egg yolk (12.97%)

226.87g forced rhubarb jam (24.53%)

Method for the ice cream

1. Put all the ingredients into a large pan, and apply heat.

2. Stir constantly until a custard is formed - when a line can be drawn in the mixture on the back of a spoon.

3. Chill for several hours and preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to cool to 20C before refrigerating.

4. Rewhisk; I used a balloon whisk on a stand mixer.

5. Stain the mixture through a sieve to remove the pieces of rhubarb.

6. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at soft serve texture (it takes a while to reach it, there’s less sugar than usual.)

7. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

This is actually the second ice cream I made using rhubarb jam; the first one was more closely following the original recipe and put in a cream base, but I don’t think it works very well. There’s not much water in the recipe, and the mixture was very thick, I couldn’t actually strain it all so a pint of cream did not make as much ice cream as usual. It also didn’t have much flavour, you could certainly tell there’s a fruit in it but the distinctiveness of rhubarb did not come through. So then I thought, rhubarb and custard is a classic combination, and I do make custard ice creams… I’ll be honest, I still don’t think it’s that successful. There is more flavour to it and it is definitely rhubarb, but the taste of the custard base forms part of this and so wouldn’t work for all flavours of jam. On this occasion, I think my friend with the oft-quoted “If the Victorians had perfected ice cream we’d still be making it like that” is right - perhaps that’s why Jarrin and Jeanes didn’t do jam recipes, they had better access to fresh fruit being around a bit later, and that is the superior way of making fruit ice cream.