The Pineapple Encore

We’re back on a proper genuine Gunter’s recipe, for the first time in weeks! There is literally a recipe from Nutt called Royal Ice Cream. Quite what makes this one in particular royal I’m not sure, except it’s going to be very rich with a lot of egg yolks - the most I’ve seen in any recipe - and all the ingredients. Nutt wrote a second book called  The Imperial and Royal Cook , although I’ve so far failed to find out whether Nutt ever was a royal cook or if he simply shared recipes that would have been well suited to the royal household. Ice cream was in good company there. The first known mention of ice cream in England was for a royal banquet, and confectioners who knew how to get cream to freeze were valued. Ice cream was expensive, both for the skill taken to make it and the ingredients to make it. Sugar was expensive, vanilla was expensive, chocolate was expensive, and in none of the recipes did the confectioners seem to give much thought to using expensive ingredients which ...

Last week and this week have been a nice exploration of my start in ice cream making. Last week we saw  how I literally got started  with my mum’s ice cream machine and my dad’s tidiness, and this week is all about how I started making historic ice creams. For a book that I’ve never made a single recipe from, Gelato Messina can take a lot of credit for my approach to ice cream. I had spent some time darting around different recipes from different sources, including my most used learning resources Hello My Name Is Ice Cream, and having driven myself half insane with perfectionism before realising that I don’t want to make Ben & Jerry’s because I could just go out and buy a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, I decided I wanted to make something special that was just mine. I wondered if proper gelato could be my thing, which led to me buying  Gelato Messina . It reads as a wonderfully well informed book and I’m sure it would enable the reader to make excellent gelato, but I never...

I’ve said  before , my entry into ice cream making happened mostly because my dad wanted to empty the house of some of the kitchen equipment that my mum had bought and then used maybe twice. My mum likes trying different things but not many of them stick. The ice cream machine came along at a fortunate time, I was recovering from a badly broken ankle and not long after I got the machine I developed pneumonia and had a subsequent long recovery from that, and it was difficult to participate in my primary hobbies, so a hobby I could do with minimal exertion and from my own kitchen was ideal. (I suspect this may have also been why I specifically was given the ice cream machine.) So I thank my mum - and my dad’s tidiness - for my ice cream. The one thing my mum didn’t really do was actually make ice cream. No one in my family is particularly domestic, the only one I could imagine making ice cream would have been my grandma on my dad’s side, but ice cream wasn’t her vice - that was chees...

I am a huge fan of the Fallout franchise, have been for years. With the release of the TV series (which is excellent, by the way; so much better than 3 Body Problem, another adaptation I’d highly anticipated that was released at roughly the same time and which disappointed so much) I was in a Fallout nostalgia mood and wondered if anyone had made Nuka-Cola and that’s how I found YouTube videos of people making it from the official Fallout cookbook and in the process discovered that there is a Fallout ice cream that is made as part of the Nuka-Cola float. It was an actual ice cream recipe that needed an ice cream machine. I ended up buying the book because by this point I was extremely excited by the prospect of Fallout food. I’ve said before that I don’t like putting up recipes directly from books that are still being actively sold, but I will say I wouldn’t bother making Fallout ice cream exactly as it appears in the book. It’s 27% fat! And it tastes like it, it has that classic fatty...