Strawberry ice cream with swan water ice I have slipped across the Yorkshire border into Nottinghamshire to spend a day at the School of Artisan Food on the beautiful, stately Welbeck Estate, near Worksop.
It is housed in a refurbished stable block midst sprawling parkland where avenues of linden trees release their fragrant scent into the late summer air. The school specialises in running hands on courses steeped in culinary traditions such as bread and cheese making. The tutors are leaders in their field and dedicated to making authentic food using the best quality ingredients and traditional skills.
Today I am learning to make
Historic Ices
with food historian Ivan Day. Ivan is usually based in his 17th century Cumbrian farmhouse where he runs; a private museum which houses his collection of cooking memorabilia and re-created historic table settings, and period cookery courses on subjects such as roasting, pie making and Christmas cookery.
Laid out on the table before us is part of Ivan's collection of historic ice moulds - some dating back to the 18th century. There are bombe moulds, pillar moulds, moulds in the shape of a pair of courting doves, swans, a wedge of cheese and even asparagus moulds. Ivan explained the smaller moulds were filled with coloured ices and used to garnish large elaborate ice creams.
Also - all the
paraphernalia
used to make and store ices in the days long before refrigeration was powered by electricity. There are ice buckets and pails and a curious
stirring
device known as a spaddle, used to churn ice cream as it freezes.
"All the food we eat today is inherited food. We think food is modern but it is not and most has seen better days" Ivan tells us as he begins our course on ice-cream making on what must be the hottest day of the year. "Often ingredients used in the past were better than those used today" he adds.
In the past ice-cream was a novelty food eaten by the rich. There was no restaurant culture in this country until relatively recently and the aristocracy ate ice cream,
prepared by skilled chefs
,
in their fine houses.
The first recipes for ice cream appeared in the early 17
th
century. Lady Anne Fanshaw recorded a recipe for ice cream in her diary*. The recipe did not actually work because she forgot to mention the ice required salt to reduce the temperature low enough to freeze the ingredients. By the mid 17th century the earliest book of ice cream was published in Naples.
Salt is essential in the preparation of ice for the ice bucket. It can reduce the freezing temperature of ice to minus 21 degrees centigrade. The physics of this process is fascinating and relies on the way in which salt molecules disrupt the dynamic equilibrium between melting and freezing water molecules.
As we recreated a 19th century strawberry ice cream of our own we had to add a very liberal sprinkling of salt to the ice bucket in the proportion of one part salt to six of ice.
Originally ice creams and ices were made in pewter freezing pots. Pewter is made from copper and tin and is not eroded by salt making it perfect for the job of freezing ices.
In the absence of electricity all attempts at refrigeration relied on a steady supply of imported ice. Until the early 19th century much of the ice was collected from frozen lakes and rivers during the winter and stored in ice houses but much of it was dirty. In 1830 the UK started to import clean ice from Greenland which revolutionised refrigeration making it safer to store perishable foods.
Chefs were adventurous and imaginative when it came to designing and flavouring ices and ice creams. Ambergris, a biliary secretion from the sperm whale that smells vaguely of violets was popular together with bergamot, derived from the rind of the Spanish orange and orange flower water. Highly decoratice ices were coloured with spinach water for green and cochineal for red.
Ice cream was popular with royalty and there are some wonderful illustrations of Charles II eating it at court.
By the late eighteenth century decorative porcelain ice pails appeared to keep ice cream frozen after it had been made. These were filled with ice and salt and topped with a lid holding more ice and salt. Placed inside is
a pottery liner for the ice cream which could be kept frozen for up to four hours.
Making ice cream was popular in Naples and during the 1850's Italian immigrants began to sell ice cream around Clerkenwell in London.
By 1890 the equipment to make ice cream became more available and eating ice cream began to filter down through the social classes.
This was the beginning of the democratisation of ice cream eating.
By the beginning of the 20
th
century glasses used to serve ice cream were deemed to be unhygienic and the wafer cone was invented. Hokey Pokey - block ice cream wrapped in paper was sold. "Hokey pokey" was a slang term for ice cream in the 19th and early 20th centuries in several areas — including New York and parts of the UK. It was used for the ice cream sold by street vendors or "hokey - pokey" men. The vendors, said to be mostly of Italian descent, supposedly used a sales pitch or song involving the phrase "hokey pokey", for which several origins have been suggested, although no certain etymology is known.
Hygiene regulations were introduced in 1903 and many cellars making ice cream were closed down. Any that remained had to have wash down tile walls and use pasteurised milk to make ice cream. During the first world war ice cream making was banned because of rationing.
From the 1920's onwards ice cream making in the UK was industrialised. The first company to manufacture ice cream on an industrial scale was Walls & Sons – originally butchers who ceased the opportunity to buy machinery from the US and mass produce ice cream.
Today 98% of the ice cream eaten in the UK is mass produced.
Industrially produced ice creams contain an array of gels, gums,
stabilisers, emulsifiers
added flavours and sweeteners which replace expensive ingredients, extend freezer life and maximise profits.
"By far the best way to eat ice cream today is to make it yourself" says Ivan as he showed us how.
This recipe is for a premium quality strawberry ice cream. It is heart achingly delicious and can be churned in a modern ice cream maker. It would be rare to find an ice cream of this quality in a modern supermarket. Note the garnish of maidenhair fern. This is an authentic touch. The fern was not eaten but used to make the ice cream as beautiful as it tastes. Also - the Imperial units are authentic.
To make 19th century strawberry ice cream
Serves 6
1 pint whipping cream
1 pint of strawberries
juice of a lemon
7 oz caster sugar
sprig of maidenhead fern
Blitz the strawberries and cream with a handheld stick blender. Add the lemon juice and churn in a modern
ice cream maker.
NB We churned the ice cream in a pewter freezing pot packed with ice and salt using a spaddle, which scrapes the freezing mixture from the sides of the pot. It took us about 20 minutes.
*
Interestingly Lady Ann Fanshawe compiled a collection of recipes from 1651 which are held at the Wellcome Trust collection of 'Recipes and Remedies' in London. The volume is a vast accumulation of culinary and medicinal knowledge, and reflects Fanshawe's intense interest in testing out a broad range of recipes, from ice cream to perfumes to cures for melancholy. Her everyday recipes are interesting because they shed light not only on how food of the day was cooked but also on 17th-century medical knowledge and the role of women as household physicians.