Available in print on Amazon^• and Lulu.

In their 1926 Frozen Desserts and Salads, Frigidaire described the “two classes” of ice creams:

Philadelphia Ice Cream, which is made from thin cream, sugar and flavoring, frozen without thickeners or without whipping the cream, and French Ice Cream which has a custard foundation (made from egg) with thin cream and a flavoring.

They went on to describe the variations on frozen desserts:

A mousse is a heavy cream, beaten stiff, sweetened and flavored and frozen by packing without stirring, highly adaptable to preparation in Frigidaire.

The same is true of parfait, a sugar syrup poured over either beaten egg white or yolk of egg and added to the flavored cream.

Sherbets and ices are, naturally, of thinner consistency and likely to show ice particles, but can be made smooth by manipulation.

Understanding these differences was important to Frigidaire’s sales. In 1926 few households were likely to have any experience making ice creams beyond hand-cranked machines filled with salted ice. They were hard work and they made a mess. Those households fortunate enough to own a refrigerator had a lot more options available to them, options once only available when going out to eat at businesses with commercial freezers. Frigidaire wanted people to know about those options, and hopefully buy a Frigidaire refrigerator/freezer because of them!

Over the last year, I’ve discovered two new recipes from old standbys in my cookbook collection, and two new recipes from an even earlier, 1927, cookbook. I’m going to handle these recipes from the youngest to the oldest.

Cranberry Ice

Philadelphia

Lemon Sherbet

Walnut Brittle

Let’s start in 1947 with a fresh fruit ice, the only recipe this year that does not contain cream. It is pretty good with whipped cream on top. But what dessert isn’t?

Cranberry Ice

Servings: 8
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1947 Cold Cookery
Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest (PDF File, 10.2 MB)

Ingredients

• 1 quart fresh or frozen cranberries
• 1 cup water
• 1-½ cups sugar
• Juice of ½ lemon
• Juice of ½ orange

Steps

1. Boil cranberries and water until berries soften and pop.
2. Run cranberries through food mill or sieve.
3. Add sugar to purée.
4. Dissolve sugar over low heat.
5. Add lemon and orange juice.
6. Cool to room temperature..
7. Freeze.

I made this Cranberry Ice from the 1947 Norge Cold Cookery as an alternative to cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving last year.¹ It is very flavorful, and a good argument for using cranberries year-round. This colorful ice would be a lovely dessert late on a hot summer evening!

The original recipe calls for sieving the boiled cranberries, but then it calls the result a “puree”. So I decided to just puree the cranberries in a blender without sieving them, and keep all that wonderful cranberry-skin goodness. It appears to have worked fine. Old recipes are wonderful, but modern appliances are the best way to make them. That’s kind of the point of these refrigerator pamphlets. They were literally part of the advertising campaign for one of the most amazing inventions of the 20th century. Reliable refrigeration and freezing were a vast improvement over the haphazard food preservation methods before electricity.

Now let’s pass back through the Second World War to 1942:

Philadelphia Ice Cream

Servings: 6
Preparation Time: 45 minutes
Refrigerator Revolution Revisited: 1942 Cold Cooking
Montgomery Ward’s Cold Cooking (PDF File, 9.9 MB)

Ingredients

• 3 tsp gelatin
• ¼ cup cold water
• 2 cups milk
• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla

Steps

1. Scald milk.
2. Dissolve gelatin in cold water and mix into hot milk.
3. Add sugar and stir to dissolve.
4. Allow to cool.
5. Stir in vanilla.
6. Partially freeze, about one to two hours.
7. Whip cream and fold in.
8. Freeze several hours or overnight.

Because ice creams made in the freezer are not churned until they freeze, gelatin is often used to improve the texture. In Electric Refrigerator Menus and Recipes, “Miss Alice Bradley” wrote:

The use of gelatin or flour to thicken, and of corn syrup in place of part of the sugar, insures a smoother mixture than is secured with ordinary recipes.

This Philadelphia Ice Cream from Montgomery Ward’s 1942 Cold Cooking doesn’t just add gelatin in addition to other ingredients, it replaces the egg entirely, so that the ice cream is basically… cream, with gelatin as its only non-cream thickener. It’s kind of like stabilized whipped cream. Like eating whipped topping but made with real cream.

This is far from a bad thing, as you’ll find when you try that very simple, very good, vanilla ice cream.

Two of the recipes this year come from “Miss Alice Bradley” by way of General Electric’s 1927 Electric Refrigerator Recipes and Menus. The first is this wonderful sherbet made with lemon juice, milk, cream, and gelatin. The original recipe suggests replacing half of the sugar with corn syrup to ensure smoothness. I haven’t found that necessary.

Lemon Cream Sherbet

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Miss Alice Bradley
Electric Refrigerator Menus and Recipes (ebook, Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 2 tsp gelatin
• 2 tbsp cold water
• ⅔ cup sugar
• ⅓ cup lemon juice (about two lemons)
• 1-½ cups milk
• ½ cup heavy cream or sour cream
• pinch of salt

Steps

1. Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water and allow to dissolve.
2. Meanwhile, mix the sugar, lemon juice, milk, cream, and salt together well.
3. When the gelatin is soaked, place it in a pan of water and bring the water to a boil.
4. When the gelatin turns transparent, whip into the sherbet.
5. Chill in the freezer until ice forms around the edges, about two hours.
6. Beat ten minutes or until very light.
7. Return to freezer and freeze several hours or overnight.

One of the really interesting features of this recipe is that it calls for “½ cup cream, sweet or sour”. I’ve tried it both ways, and unsurprisingly the different ingredients make for a very different sherbet. Heavy cream makes it lighter and creamier; sour cream makes it smoother and tangier. Both are amazing. It might also work with buttermilk if you enjoy that flavor in your frozen desserts. It should also work with Greek yogurt.

If you have access to black walnuts, this is a great recipe to use them in.

Walnut Brittle Ice Cream

Servings: 4
Preparation Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Miss Alice Bradley
Electric Refrigerator Menus and Recipes (ebook, Internet Archive)

Ingredients

• 1 cup milk
• 1 tsp gelatin
• 3 egg yolks
• ¼ cup sugar
• pinch of salt
• ⅓ cup sugar
• ⅓ cup chopped walnuts (black if possible)
• 1 cup cream
• 2 tsp vanilla

Steps

1. Whisk gelatin into milk.
2. Heat milk to scalding over double boiler, whisking often.
3. Mix egg yolks with ¼ cup sugar and salt.
4. Whisk hot milk slowly into yolks.
5. Return to double boiler and heat, stirring constantly, until thickened to coat spoon.
6. Cool to room temperature.
7. Meanwhile, heat ⅓ cup sugar in pan, stirring until melted and slightly brown.
8. Add walnuts and turn onto lightly buttered sheet.
9. When cool, chop in blender, food processor, or food chopper.
10. Add to custard.
11. Beat cream until stiff.
12. Fold whipped cream and vanilla into custard.
13. Freeze until it starts to freeze at the edges, about an hour. Beat well.
14. Freeze about another two hours and beat well again.
15. Freeze several hours or overnight.

I’m not sure why Bradley’s original recipe titles this Walnut “Nougat” Ice Cream. The walnut part of it is standard nut brittle. Possibly terminology has changed over the nearly one hundred years since Electric Refrigerator Menus and Recipes came out in 1927. Possibly “Miss Alice Bradley” just liked the title better. Regardless, this is a fun dessert and a hard one to mess up. There’s no egg white in it (making nougat an especially odd term) but with both egg yolk and gelatin it ought to firm up nicely with lots of leeway for your own personal cooking style.

Wonderful gadgets of 1927!

These are all wonderful recipes to help you cool down as the summer heats up. If you prefer making your food from cookbooks rather than from web sites, I have one more treat for you. I’ve decided to use this post as an excuse to try out a new idea for a cookbook. The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery (PDF File, 3.2 MB) is a color cookbook of twenty-four ice cream recipes, including these four. They’re all recipes featured in my summer ice series so, combined with my making the PDF available as a download (PDF File, 3.2 MB), there’s no reason for you to get a printed copy unless, like me, you prefer printed copies when you’re in the kitchen. The PDF is, however, an exact duplicate of the print version’s contents.

The book is available at both Amazon^• and Lulu. The price and content are the same.

I have no specific plans to make these color books a series. I happen to like ice cream, so I have a lot of ice cream recipes I’d like to popularize. I also like breakfasts, so I might do a granola book. My main cookbook will continue to be A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book, for the simple reason that I don’t normally need a cookbook to make my favorite recipes when I’m not traveling: they’re all from cookbooks I own. That’s why I made Traveling Man, because I don’t have my library when I’m traveling.

Because Ice Cream Cookery is not a traveling book, it does have some recipes that are not in Traveling Man. However, all of the recipes have been featured on one or more of my various blog posts. Ice Cream Cookery simply collects them into one place that’s easier to use in the kitchen. Enjoy! (PDF File, 3.2 MB)

1926 Frigidaire pamphlet. Frozen desserts were a selling point for refrigerators from the start.

“When is the party going to begin?” When you have ice cream from a General Electric Refrigerator! (1927)