Week Eighteen: Future week

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 coating mouthfeel from an ice cream too high in fat; I will note that it does work better in the Nuka-Cola float than by itself, almost like that’s what it was made for or something… Also missing from the recipe was any instruction to strain it, but it definitely needed straining at some point. I think Victoria Rosenthal is the opposite of me, she’s a good cook but not a good baker. The cooking recipes generally work well, but the baking and sweet recipes are often lacking something. For example, Nuka-Cola Quartz involves making a vanilla syrup which does work but then making the drink tells you to mix cream into water. That doesn’t work, it separates, it’s like that Friends scene with Kappuccino with a K - stir it constantly, never let it settle. (I reckon if you incorporated an emulsifier in the syrup you could get it to combine, something to experiment with perhaps..?)

Ice cream doesn’t really feature in the Fallout games - there are allusions to it when you see old pre-war adverts or abandoned old parlours, but it doesn’t appear in itself. And it’s not hard to understand why, how would it stay frozen for hundreds of years in a post nuclear apocalyptic world for a start? So without a solid base in the game to draw from, let’s look at the real world influence of the Fallout universe: the 1950s. The world of Fallout is retro-futuristic, and closely resembles the ‘what the future will look like’ imaginings of the 50s and 60s, where everyone lived in space age looking cities and drove flying cars, but still wore poodle skirts and fedoras. Fallout is essentially ‘what if tastes and fashions stalled in the 1950s, but technology and attitudes didn’t?’ On that basis, let’s take a look at 1950s ice creams. It wasn’t actually easy for me, living in 2020s UK, to find 1950s American ice cream recipes; they’re not old enough to be all over the internet like the Victorian recipes I usually use are, and short of getting very lucky in a second hand book shop I was unlikely to find any printed books. I did have one stroke of good luck though: for only £3, I bought the Good Housekeeping’s Book of Ice Creams and Cool Drinks on Apple Books, originally printed in 1958 in Chicago, Illinois. It actually had two vanilla ice cream recipes (well three, but one was a custard base and I was strictly interested in an eggless ice cream for this endeavour), one seems meant to be no-churn style but I’ve seen people churn similar recipes. Using a mixture of them and the original Nuka ice cream recipe, I ended up at a base recipe that is a bit different to my usual ice creams but still embodies the high fat and high sugar of the original Nuka recipe whilst making it palatable - it’s Nuka recipe ingredients with 1950s ratios. (I do find it interesting that we decry modern diets as being high fat and high sugar, and yet ice cream gets ‘healthier’ over the years.)

I took the essence of the 1950s recipe to the extreme in making the future part of my new Nuka ice cream. The book recipe is all fresh ingredients, like the Gunters ice creams. The 1950s ice creams were all vanilla extract, so I decided to replace all the flavouring with extracts - vanilla, cinnamon and anise. I generally use the fresh ingredients in my ice cream, as in my vanilla ice cream uses vanilla pods not vanilla extract, but they can be both expensive and time consuming. Fast food and convenience ready made food has its roots in the post-WWII years, and to the two working parent family, there just wasn’t the time to make everything from scratch anymore. Not that women no longer being restricted to making complicated food at home is a bad thing, you understand. I’ll admit it made a nice change to make quick and easy ice cream.

Fallout ice cream

Ingredients

As always, use the percentages to make the amount you want

597.82g single (19% butterfat) cream (60.92%)

180.48g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (18.39%)

188.89g caster sugar (19.25%)

11.57g vanilla extract (1.18%)

2g anise extract (0.2%)

0.55g cinnamon extract (0.056%)

Method

I use a stand mixer and balloon whisk.

1. Put the creams in a bowl, and slowly whisk whilst gradually adding the sugar.

2. Add the flavour extracts and whisk until fully but just combined.

3. Churn according to your machine’s instructions, stopping at soft serve texture. 

4. Put ice cream into a container and place in freezer for at least four hours, preferably longer.

This was so simple, and worked really well. I’m not actually a huge fan of cinnamon as a flavour, and was a bit worried that the direct and punchy nature of cinnamon extract compared to letting it gently infuse would overwhelm, but it actually worked well. The only criticism I have is it had a very slight minty taste, but I suspect that’s to do with the quality of the extracts - mine were purchased from Amazon and probably were not the highest quality. The minty taste goes after the first spoonful or two though, and then it’s just delicious.

It’s really good in a Nuka-Cola float too.