Round One: Paris Saint-Germain vs. The Eagles, a.k.a. Football vs. Football a.k.a. Glace Vanille vs. Vanilla Ice Cream

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Now Serving! Our culinary adventure begins with the Lello the Magic Gelato Machine, a long-awaited arrival to brighten my little kitchen nest. Lello arrived on July 29 at 4pm, at a hefty 33 pounds. The first thing I did was ring in my 38th year at 12:02 am with a batch of blackberry sorbet. It was tasty, but just as an education in cooking starts with learning how to make eggs in every fashion, I've decided to learn my future profession from the ground up, starting with the mailroom of the iced desserts world: vanilla ice cream.

Ice Cream: The Abridged History

Like every favorite food, from pizza to pasta, ice cream has a highly contested history whose cast involves the usual suspects: China, Italy, France, the US, with Persia as the unknown starlet who steals the scene.

Larousse Gastronomique commences its historical tour de glace with the keenly astute observation that "the history of ice cream is linked with that of gastronomy and refrigeration." It goes on to credit the Chinese with knowing "the art of making iced drinks and desserts long before the Christian era." This art, the Chinese supposedly taught to "the Arabs, who began making syrups chilled with snow, called sharbets (hence the word 'sherbet' and 'sorbet.') At the court of Alexander the Great, and later under Nero, fruit salads and purees were served mixed with honey and snow. It was not until the 13th century, however, that Marco Polo is said to have brought back from the East the secret of cooling without ice, by running a mixture of water and saltpetre over containers filled with the substance to be cooled. Thus the great fashion of water ices began in Italy." The Gastronomic Committee at Larousse then goes on to credit Catherine de Medici with bringing this technology to the French court when she wed Henri II, but that this culinary novelty was not discovered by the Parisian hoi polloi until Francesco Procopio opened his famous Cafe Le Procope there a century later. Although ices made with milk, cream, and eggs appeared on the scene around 1775, this technique had apparently been discovered in 1650 by a French cook (mais bien sur!) in Charles I's English court, but had been paid by the king to keep his method a secret.

In any case, Larousse essentially gives the French and Italian chefs credit for all advances in the field until 1822, with the creation of such flavors as: "Malmsey wine from Alicante, angelica liqueur, the yolks of finch eggs, sugary melon, hazelnuts and mint liqueur, green tea and citron juice, pistachios and peach juice." However, the US is given its due for taking the ball and running with it in the 20th century, with "itinerant ice-cream vendors ... selling in the streets;" Larousse notes that the US "has been particularly creative, inventing myriad new flavours and ways of eating ice cream, including sundaes..., sodas..., milk shakes..., malts...and pie a la mode (pie with a scoop of ice cream)." I think it's hilarious that they translated pie a la mode.

For me, the Larousse is, as Jacques Pepin is quoted on the flap as saying, "the first place I look when I need to clarify a cooking question." Due to my own knowledge of French views on cooking, however, it is rarely the only place I look if I am concerned about historical accuracy and, surtout, impartiality. The tip off here was the egregious error in ascribing the Persian place in ice-cream making (taking place, according to Larousse, prior to Alexander the Great) to the Arabs, who did not conquer Persia until 900 years after Alexander's death around 323 B.C.

In any case, there is an excellent unabridged history of ice cream, with appropriate source citations, at The Nibble, and What's Cooking America but the key dates are:

4,000 B.C.: Chinese master the art of frozen desserts, including the key discovery that using salt and cool water/ice on the outside of a container lowers the freezing point of the contents inside the container. [Ed. Note: It has been brought to my attention that this is an inaccurate description of the science behind the method, but it's too long to explain here - stay tuned for a post on why ice+salt is necessary to make the ice cream freeze. In short, it lowers the temperature of the ice/liquid outside the canister, enabling the contents to freeze. Don't think too much about this or your head will hurt. Just trust me on this.]
2,500 B.C.: Persians, whose empire borders China, learn these nifty tricks. They are renowned for drinking fruit syrups cooled with ice (sharbat), a proto-Sno Cone of fruit ices sweetened with honey and cooled with snow. In a "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter moment," they also cross two favorite desserts - sorbet and rice pudding - into a dessert called faludeh around 400 B.C. - a delicious concoction of milk and vermicelli still served today and featuring rose water, saffron, lemon, and dried fruits.
300's B.C.:Alexander loves Persian snowcones so much, he has slaves climb mountains and bring down snow and store it in 30 foot deep trenches to ensure that his troops can enjoy their sharbat during battle, helping to eventually secure victory over the Persians after 10 years of war.
50 BC: Nero, the copycat, does what Alexander did, but makes his slaves run up and down the mountains for his snow.
700 AD: Arabs conquer Italy, bringing sorbet and pasta, which they acquired from their conquest of Persia 100 years earlier. Italians make granita, the much chunkier, and easier-to-make version of sorbet and commence securing their place in ice cream history.
1500s: Renaissance starts and while royalty dined on iced desserts, there is in fact no support whatsoever for the stories regarding Catherine de Medici (who was a mere 14 year old at the time of her marriage) nor Charles I's chef having invented ice cream.
1660 - 1690: - first recipes for flavored ices appear in French cookbooks and Starbucks-precursor Le Procope opens, serving coffee (of which Voltaire is said to have drunk 40 cups per day) and some sort of frozen dessert -whether sorbet or true ice cream, seems in dispute - to wealthy Parisians and later to Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. You can have it too, if you want - Le Procope is still open and still a Parisian highlight.
1744: A group of Virginia commissioners dine at the Maryland Governor's home, where they are served "a Dessert no less Curious; Among the Rarities of which it was Compos'd, was some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously."
1769: Elizabeth Raffold's The Experienced English Housekeeper includes a recipe for what looks like ice cream to me.
1770 - First U.S. gelateria opens in New York.
1777 - Philip Lenzi advertises in the New York Gazette that his business has ice cream available almost every day.
1802: Thomas Jefferson serves ice cream at a state dinner. He also writes his own recipe for vanilla ice cream, available for view on line here or in person (apparently) at the Library of Congress (I feel a subsequent episode coming along, perhaps with assistance from my dear friend and fellow foodie, Hannah).
1813 - Sallie Shadd, a freed slave, claims to have invented ice cream made of fruit, cream, and sugar, in Wilmington, Delaware. Dolly Madison travels to taste this new specialty and loves it so much that she serves it as the dessert at her husband's second inauguration, and at all state dinners thereafter.
1834 - Augustus Jackson devises the first modern method of manufacturing ice cream using ice and salt (per the Chinese method) to make ice cream in tin cans. After quitting as White House chef, he sells his ice cream to Philadelphia ice cream parlors. Augustus is African American and, as usual, some white person gets the patent and most of the credit.
1843 - Nancy Johnson receives first patent for the hand-crank ice cream maker, not unlike the same version sold by White Mountain today, enabling everyone to get their kids to crank that sucker for 45 minutes on hot summer evenings, with the end result that most pleasurable of childhood memories: homemade ice cream. I can still taste the eau de rock salt, and I say that fondly.
1851 - Jacob Fussell, a Baltimore milk dealer, has so much milk that to keep it from going sour and to expand his clientele, he starts manufacturing ice cream on an larger scale, and is credited with being the father of commercial ice cream production.
1865 - Term "hokey-pokey" enters the lexicon due to explosion of Italian ice-cream vendors on U.S. streets after the Civil War. Term itself is likely a corruption of "ecco un poco" (here's a little) or "O, che poco!" (oh how little) - presumably a reference to the price of the product.
1926 - Invention of continuous process freezer leads to the birth of the industrialization of ice cream production.

Whew! And there is so much more to learn, especially at Linda Stradley's What's Cooking America website.

The City of Lights vs. The City of Brotherly Love: Ice Cream Styles 101

So why the title of this post? As the history above hints at, modern ice cream really has its roots in Italy and France but its heart in America. Paris is where ice cream was first made fashionable, but Philly is where it became the Brangelina of the dessert world. One of the first differences that crops up when you start reading about making ice cream is the major dividing line between what is now called either French style ice cream or frozen custard vs. Philadelphia style ice cream (no alias), or as is seen on display in the ice cream case: French vanilla vs. Vanilla.

These two items are not dissimilar from football in France (aka soccer) vs. football in the U.S. in that both involve similar ingredients. In soccer vs. football, both have a field, two teams of about the same size, and a ball - and similar rules - your team has one side of the field, your opponent the other, and to score, you must get the ball across the furthest line on the opponent's side of the field. It is how one scores that differentiates the two games - one is primarily done with the feet; the other with the hands. Paris Saint-Germain vs. the Eagles. And oh what a difference is found in the "how."

French and Philadelphia style ice creams are much the same in that they both have a base of milk, cream, sugar, and some sort of flavor or fruit, you're heating it up to dissolve the sugar, then cooling it down and churning it all the while to prevent it from freezing solid or crystallizing. The difference between them really comes down to one thing: French vanilla has eggs; Philadelphia vanilla does not. So if you wondered why French vanilla looks yellow and regular vanilla looks white, that's the difference. Like soccer, eggs impart a magical sophistication, skill, and depth to cooking that is hard to imitate. Eggs bind, they emulsify, they stabilize, they add depth, they are the magical shape-shifters of the culinary universe. Eggs are ridiculously talented. And when blended into an ice cream base, they act as an emulsifier and a stabilizer for the fat from the cream and the milk. They also add a richness to the flavor. Ice cream without eggs is an act of brute force, much like the Eagles' running game. You're forcing the fat to freeze and you're churning it to keep it from crystallizing, but the fat never really binds to the water of the concoction, and the moment the heat hits that puppy turns to a milk shake. On the other hand, like many French dishes, French-style ice cream is dense and rich and it can overwhelm delicate flavors. There is nothing so all-American as Philadelphia-style strawberry ice cream on a hot summer's day - it's sweet frothiness is the perfect end to a dinner of grilled burgers and corn on the cob.

In saying this, I have in some ways told you the ending of the story. But like all sports, there is joy in the playing, regardless of who wins the game. And so begins our first match: The Thrilla of Vanilla.

You Say Vanille...

I have chosen The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz, as my initial guide into the world of ice cream making, along with the Lello instruction manual and recipe booklet. He has a head-to-head recipe of French vanilla vs. Philadelphia style vanilla which are the basis for this first episode of Now Serving. First up, French or custard-style ice cream or glace vanille.

The ingredients are simple: 1 cup whole milk, 3/4 c. sugar, 2 c. cream, pinch salt, 1 vanilla bean, 6 egg yolks (6!!), and 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract.
Quality out depends 100% on quality in, in my experience, so I shuffled off to the organic market for the freshest, least-doctored dairy products I could find, from Trickling Springs Creamery in Chambersburg, PA. Yep, those are glass bottles, which they swear makes it taste better (I agree) and they also adhere to the first principle of environmental conservation: rinse and reuse. I haven't seen these since I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Wahoo, who still got daily deliveries from the Roberts Dairy milkman. The milk box was a standard component of my front porch games. Anyway, there you have it: the components of my glace vanille.

Step One of any ice cream is to heat the milk and some of the cream with the sugar and salt until the sugar dissolves. Then add the vanilla bean (scrape out the seeds first, then add the seeds and the pod) and let it steep, covered for 30 minutes. It looks like this:

Now comes the tricky part: making the custard. It's like riding a bike though. Figure it out - including falling down once - and you've got it forevermore. In Lebovitz' version, 1 c. of the cream and the extract have been reserved to receive the custard - I put them in a stainless steel bowl. Whisk the egg yolks in a measuring cup (you can freeze the whites for use in other things) and add about a cup of the steeped vanilla mixture (should still be warm, take out the bean) to the eggs, whisking while you work. Once mixed, pour the eggy vanilla mixture back into the remaining milk/cream mixture in the pot and turn the heat back on (low-medium) and stir constantly. A spatula helps reach every corner of the pot, but isn't necessary. What you're looking for is that moment when the liquid turns slightly solid and coats the back of a spatula such that you can run your finger down it and the divide remains (Lebovitz says this happens around 170-175, but it was closer to 180 for me). Do not overcook or you will end up with a separated eggy concoction which, fortunately, you can reconstitute if you work fast, by sticking it in the blender on high.


See the finger line down the spatula? Ta-da: custard!! Once you have your custard base, you now need to cool it, pronto. This is done by pouring the custard in the stainless or other non-reactive bowl (metals just transfer cold faster) with the remaining cream, putting it in an ice bath, and stirring constantly until the mixture feels cold. You can tell this is the case if the bowl itself (above the mixture) starts to feel cold.

Once cooled, pour the base into a container and put it in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight until thoroughly chilled. Then pour it into your mixer and freeze according to directions. Lello took about 45 minutes to reach this consistency:




...I Say Vanilla

Take 2. Now we've got 2 c. cream, 1 c. milk, 3/4 c. sugar, pinch salt, 1 vanilla bean, and 3/4 tsp. vanilla extract: Same general idea: Heat 1 c. of cream with the sugar, the vanilla bean and its seeds, and heat on medium until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and add remaining ingredients, stir, and put into container and chill the mixture until cold. Then process according to your machine's instructions.

In the end, here are our contenders, scooped out of their plastic containers after a night in the freezer, and displayed side by side:

Can you guess which is which? It's pretty easy: Philadelphia style is on the left; French vanilla is on the right. As one might predict the Philadelphia style version was much lighter and closer in taste to the memories I had of hand-cranked ice cream - fresh milk and sugar with the perfume of vanilla dancing on the palate. However, to my surprise, this version has a slightly waxy mouthfeel to it, the cause for which will be explored in future episodes, but in short comes down to the fact that I was using unhomogenized dairy products. I think.

The French style vanilla was superb. It was rich, very vanilla-y, and had a luxurious mouthfeel with no waxy sensation. It also held its shape better and didn't melt as rapidly. Because of the eggs, the vanilla was a bit more muted, but overall the glace vanille won the battle, edging its Philadelphia brother out on the basis of texture.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed the show and will come back for our next installment of Now Serving. If you try this, let me know how it went for you and whether you had similar results. Cheers!