Week Forty-One: Harvest time

Living in the English countryside, you’d think I’d have much greater access to harvest festivals than I actually do. For a start, such events are often held on weekends and I work weekends so never get an opportunity to attend them. For another, this is not actually a Victorian countryside idyll, it’s not like we spend autumn in a constant state of community social harvesting. Farming and harvest is a mechanised and industrial undertaking, and people who just live in the villages have their interaction limited to being frustrated that the tractors are driving slowly on the roads and holding up traffic. The third thing is, harvest is basically over here. I don’t personally work in farming but I have several close friends who do and they’ve been winding down on the harvest for a while.

And so, as is usual for me, I turned to history and harvest festivals of years past. Seed cake has an association with harvest going back centuries, I’ve read the caraway seeds themselves represented the wheat grains. I’ll be honest, it’s not a tradition I’ve come across before but as I said, I’ve never been a big harvest person. I used a seed cake recipe from The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, who was writing in the early mid 18th century and so was approximately contemporary with the Gunters confectioners; I would like to link it but the website archive is currently offline, search it on Google and you’ll find it, the copyright ran out a long time ago. It was my inspiration, although as you’ll soon see I didn’t actually make a seed cake.

Caraway ice cream

(You’ll see it’s called seed cake ice cream on the pot; I changed my mind on how seed cake like it was and think caraway ice cream is a more appropriate name.)

Ingredients

I made 900g of mixture, because my seed cake recipe used 36 egg yolks which I could reduce to 9 by quartering it and then used that to measure how much caraway seed to use.

540g single (19% butterfat) cream (60%)

45g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (5%)

9 egg yolks (15%, or 1 egg yolk per 100g of mixture)

180g caster sugar (20%)

45g caraway seeds (5% of total mixture)

Method

1. Put all ingredients into a pan and bring up to heat whilst constantly whisking.

2. When a line can be drawn in the mixture on the back of a spoon, the custard has been formed.

3. Leave to chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to chill to 20C before putting it into the fridge. (I didn’t strain the caraway seeds out here, but I might suggest do that now.)

4. Rewhisk just prior to churning, and if not already done strain the caraway seeds out.

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

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

I don’t like this. Unlike lapsang souchong ice cream which I can recognise as a good ice cream even if not to my tastes, I don’t think this is a good ice cream. I chose to make it as a custard base because I could use the egg yolk as a standard for how much caraway to use, but I think the flavours conflicted. The texture is fine, but the taste of caraway does not complement the taste of cream and the egg. It’s almost a sickly form of mint, and it tastes heavy and sickly. If you really like the taste of caraway try it, but I wouldn’t. I regret not doing it my originally intended way, which was make the seed cake itself and then soak it into the creams to impart flavour like people use doughnuts, and I didn’t do this because of time based reasons - simply put, my cream was running out on its date and life was busy, I didn’t have time to make a seed cake before my cream would expire. I may do this one day, but for now I’m focused on the next three ice creams, I can hardly wait to share them with you.