The Pineapple Encore

Would you believe, I’ve never had an ice cream sandwich? The idea of biting ice cream sends a chill down my spine, I generally prefer to have my ice cream served sundae style in a glass with a spoon.  In the general context of sandwiches, like most things in history - food or otherwise - the origins are a bit murky, it’s not as easy as saying the Earl of Sandwich invented them. Depending upon how loosely you define a sandwich, the earliest forms of them can be traced to simply meat wrapped in a bread. This got me thinking about ice cream cones and, whilst they’re not ice cream sandwiches, the components are basically there: a biscuit or wafer like casing holding some ice cream. A bit like sandwiches, early ice cream cones (or cornets) had a mythical origin that is likely not true: the story goes that an ice cream seller at the 1904 world fair ran out of cups and so he asked a waffle seller to fashion him something from a waffle that would hold his ice cream … and thus, the birth of...

This is the second of my suggested themes! I didn’t want to let it down, but I also bizarrely struggled with what I could make for it. Reimagining classics is what I do with my ice cream all the time; I’ve already made historic versions of  vanilla  and  chocolate , and lots of other flavours - I could make any of them and it would be reimagining a classic. But I thought about what I could do to reimagine a classic that would also be something different to what I’ve done before. What I decided to do was the reverse of what I usually do when I’m not following one of the actual Gunter’s recipes - instead of taking a modern ice cream idea and making it in the style of the Gunter’s confectioners, I decided to take a classic Gunter’s ice cream and remake it in the modern style.  I’ve said all along that I do understand modern ice cream science - it’s how I learned ice cream making, and I do still make some ice creams like it. It’s just that I didn’t enjoy making ice cream...

I don’t often use mix ins, which are what they say - they’re things that you mix in to ice cream, like chocolate chips for example. My preference is for smooth textures, and luckily for me that seemed to be the Georgian and Victorian preference too because most of the recipes are strained before churning. There are a few exceptions, and one of them was brown bread. No one ever likes the sound of this, and I’ll grant that brown bread isn’t the same as a cookie dough chunk. However it must have been a popular with the Victorian ice cream eaters, because there are a lot of brown bread ice cream recipes, and each of the Gunter’s confectioners had a different way of using brown bread in their ice cream. An amalgamation of them is what I used when I made brown bread ice cream ages ago, it was the second historic ice cream I ever made and long before this blog, but a bit like the chocolate ice creams I decided to properly try each one and come to a conclusion on which method is superior. This...

This was originally going to form its own, not-weekly-themed post, and already had the tentative title of ‘The Colour Beige’. But when I saw the theme for this week, it made me think about a sensory trick that can be played, and that was extremely related to this intended post, and so they became one. As I look back at the  photos  of my ice creams so far, there is a lot of beige with one venture into brown for the chocolate, and I suppose the ostrich ice creams are more yellow (and in real life, the strawberry and peanut butter ice cream and the sherbet were a pinky colour, although that didn’t really come out in the pictures.) A lot of natural food products don’t really give strong colouring, and cream sometimes mixed with egg yolk will lend itself to creamy, beigey colours. But the Gunter’s confectioners did talk about colouring some of their ice creams, usually using something called cochineal to get reds for the strawberry and raspberry ice creams, and Nutt uses it in mil...