Week Twenty-Nine: Africa

This on-going theme of around the world is really showing up how little travelled I am… I’ve done a reasonable amount in Europe because I don’t have to fly to get there. I hate flying, or to be more specific I hate airports. I leave the UK roughly once every seven to nine years, and I’m fortunate that I live in a beautiful country with so much to explore that I never feel tired of being here. But it does mean I have little personal experience to build these ice creams from, so I’m relying on what I have. In the case of Africa, an amazing North African restaurant where I used to live. 

So this is tagine ice cream, or more specially tagine inspired ice cream - I told a friend I was doing tagine ice cream and she said, “Would you stop trying to make savoury ice creams?” This isn’t savoury, it’s taking the sweet and spicy elements of a tagine. Specifically it’s apricot ice cream enhanced with cinnamon and saffron. We’ll start with the apricot ice cream: only one Gunter’s confectioner included apricot ice cream, it was Nutt and he actually included two, one for jam and one fresh apricots. Given we know how jams go, this is the fresh apricot one, and apart from adjusting the fat percentage it’s made exactly to his recipe. There would have been nothing unusual about cinnamon and saffron to Nutt. Cinnamon was known in Europe as early as the 7th century BCE in Greece, although its origins were mysterious until the 13th century CE, and by the mid 1700s Britain was establishing itself as a trading power in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) including cinnamon trade. As for saffron, it comes from the stems of a particular crocus and it was actually grown in England, particularly the area known as East Anglia, in the 14th century - a lot of the countries of Europe took their turn in growing saffron, after its popularity increased because it was thought to be a cure for the Black Death plague (spoiler alert, it was not.) I have a friend who grew up in a place called Saffron Walden, it’s a pretty little town that gets its name from this era. 

Tagine ice cream

Ingredients

I make the amount Nutt did, but as always use the percentages. 

354.82g single (19% butterfat) cream (45.51%)

223.18g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (28.62%)

113.47g caster sugar (14.55%)

88.17g apricot juice (11.31%) - I used four apricots to get this amount

(Cinnamon stick approximately 7g in weight, 0.9% of the total weight)

(Six to ten strands of saffron)

Method

1. Juice the apricots - I removed the stones, cut them into pieces and put them through a blender before then pushing the pulp through a sieve until there was no more liquid coming through

2. Put all ingredients into a saucepan and whisk whilst gently heating; the aim is just to encourage the flavours to infuse, not to cook it - stop as soon as you see steam

3. Leave mixture to cool in the fridge for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to bring temperature to 20C before putting it into the fridge

4. Remove the cinnamon stick and pass mixture through a sieve just prior to churning

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at a soft serve texture

6. Put ice cream into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight

Like pretty much any Gunter’s recipe, this worked well, and the flavours complemented each other perfectly. It’s not as soft as some of their ice creams; Nutt often didn’t use as much sugar, he was sometimes very vague on how much sugar to use but when he did specify it was usually less than Jarrin or Jeanes, even if the rest of the recipe was quite similar. Jarrin and Jeanes both came after American independence and the need to increase sugar sales within the UK (the strategy had been sell it to the colonies) whereas Nutt was before it - I suspect this is the reason why Nutt often used less sugar, the demand for it wasn’t as high in his time. Whilst it means the ice cream is a bit harder, it doesn’t detract from the flavour and this is one where I’d happily eat a whole bowl.