Week Twenty-Seven: North America

If modern ice cream was born in Italy before growing up in France, then America is where it found a home. There was ice cream in America before there was even a United States of America. There’s a whole style of ice cream that came to prominence in America - Philadelphia, or eggless, ice cream, so distinguished from the French custard style. Pretty much everything associate with ice cream now - floats, sundaes, cones - was either invented or popularised in America. Even ice cream at home is from America, thanks to home freezers and their growth in popularity post World War Two; freezers had already been invented, but whilst Europe recovered from the devastation of war, America was physically untouched (more or less) and turned their war economy to a luxury goods one. Whilst Britons were still under rations, Americans were buying home freezers and the frozen goods to go in it. This included ice cream.

Ironically, given that the ice cream named in America is eggless, I’ll be making Thomas Jefferson's ice cream which is a custard base (it’s also listed as a vanilla ice cream, but I see no vanilla used.) I’m just speculating but I suspect this was at least partially due to the desire to align with the French and French cuisine leading up to and during the American Revolution. There were other changes to the cuisine of the colonies due to the revolution, changes that stayed after the revolution and unification of the former colonies. Not wanting to make just another plain custard base, I wanted to incorporate some of these flavour preferences in this week’s ice cream. One of the big ones was the shift in preference from tea to coffee, following the 1773 Tea Act - it didn’t actually put more taxes on the colonies and was intended as a way for Britain to bail out the British East India Company from its debts, but it effectively granted a monopoly on tea provision in the colonies to the BEIC and was therefore unpopular. I’m making a coffee ice cream, but in a different way to the Gunter’s coffee ice cream: without the English concern of keeping the ice cream white, I’m using an instant Americano style powder.

Jefferson coffee ice cream

Ingredients

You may notice less cream in this than usual. That’s because the measurement of a pint is different between the UK and US; it’s debatable what definition of a pint the Gunters confectioners used (and it makes less difference than you’d think) but Jefferson definitely used the pre-1826 British wine pint which is the same as the modern US pint - it was exported in colonial times and remained after the UK went to Imperial units. 

446.64g single (19% butterfat) cream (62.04%)

34.69g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (4.82%)

112.5g egg yolk (15.63%)

113.4g caster sugar (15.75%)

12.65g instant coffee (1.76%)

Method

Jefferson’s recipe has a lot more steps; I condensed this in my usual sense, but intend to one day try it doing the proper steps and see how it compares.

1. Put all the ingredients into a large pan.

2. Heat whilst whisking constantly to form a custard; your custard is ready once you can draw a line in the mixture on the back of a spoon. 

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

4. Whisk just prior to churning.

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

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

This ended up a lot less sweet than my usual ice creams, for two reasons. One, I put too much coffee powder in it; the amount in the recipe is the correct amount you should use, but I skipped a step in the calculations and ended up using another half again, forgetting the most important part of checking maths - does it make sense. But two, it just doesn’t have as much sugar. I suspect we have a British boycott to explain this too: sugar largely came from the West Indies, which were largely under British control at the time, and the Sugar Act of 1763/4 increased the taxes on them. Rather than pay, they just didn’t buy sugar. (Incidentally, the high amount of sugar in things like tea in the British diet has a similar cause, it was essentially a false economy - get people’s taste for sugar up and they’ll buy more sugar from your colonial plantations.) This does mean it wasn’t as soft as my usual ice creams, although I will caveat that the extra solids from the coffee could also be part of that. It was a different coffee taste to my previous coffee ice cream, much more intense, so if you like a strong coffee this would probably suit you. Personally it’s too much coffee for me (although again, the proper amount could be fine) but I can’t deny it works well as an ice cream. I even used it in an Independence Day sundae.