The peach trees were almost collapsing under the weight of fruit, and I was licking my chops in anticipation, but not just for ripe peaches. The entire extended family was waiting for an invitation from Aunt Evie (AE) and Uncle Carl (UC) to sample some peach ice cream over at their home. Ice cream at their home was a warm weather routine and a fine social event, but they usually made ice cream with bananas in it. That is, until local peaches started ripening. Now, mind you, I ate ice cream at lots of other local homes, but theirs was tops on my chart. At the time I didn’t have a clue about why I liked theirs better than other ice creams I ate, but I am finally beginning to understand.
UC and Daddy were brothers and AE and Mama were sisters so we had almost a double-whammy set of parents, and three double-first cousins thrown in for good measure. Casual observation pointed out the differences more than the similarities of the four. The major difference between Mama and AE were size and temperament; otherwise they had lots of similar interests and motivation levels. Both women loved music, reading and could lecture on many subjects with little provocation. Neither of them tolerated foolishness very well, but both had great a sense of humor and fine intellects. On the male side, physical appearances were slightly apparent since Daddy had smooth facial skin, but UC’s face was wrinkled to the maximum extent possible. Had all of the wrinkles been flattened, UC’s face might have been at least half-again its size. However, the depth of each wrinkle was an appropriate reflection of UC’s kind and gentle nature. It wasn’t so much that Daddy was unkind or not gentle, but he was so absorbed in his hobbies of hunting and fishing that he was sometimes unaware of things around him – focused, focused, focused on catching the game, spare no life or limb. Daddy trained hounds and possessed general hunting skills that were second to none of his local hunting buddies. He had little interest in anything mechanical or electrical although he was a decent gardener. In marked contrast, UC had zero interest in hunting and fishing, but he constructed mechanical garden tools. This was before you could run to Home Depot and buy them. He built something with lumber regularly, and all devices worked well for the intended purpose. For example, UC built the house where I was born, assisted by Daddy. Both men and Uncle Bob, their younger brother, were skilled musicians, and I remember hearing all three of them whistling tunes while they worked, and they whistled on key at that. Mama and AE could also whistle pretty well, but they primarily sang hymns when they worked. The women had more formal education than the men, but all were smart. Ice cream making was one of those areas where AE and UC made their mark, at least as judged by me. Theirs was the best ice cream in the region as far as I was concerned, but then no one ever accused me of possessing discriminating taste buds or having unbiased opinions.
For most of the kids, the consumers, ice cream was merely a delicious frozen treat, and they paid scant attention to the process involved in the making. We were usually too busy eating ice cream and playing card games or croquette to bother with such details. However, I recognized even as a kid that the ice cream I ate at numerous other homes around our community just wasn’t up to snuff (acceptable quality). My interest in this subjective conclusion resulted in a lifelong curiosity and prompted an occasional investigation to attempt to explain why I thought their ice cream was better than others. The investigation got rolling when I was in college and has continued intermittently through the years. Partly having to take physics classes and eating homemade ice cream ‘round the world, much of which didn’t live up to their standards, fueled my investigation. Most homemade ice creams had too much fat in them and were not light and fluffy – things I expected in ice cream when we ate UC and AE’s product.
AE & UC’s prowess in making ice cream was probably self-taught, and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t explain any of the physics, but AE might have given it an A for effort. Had a food technology textbook been available UC probably wouldn’t have read it since he had really poor eyesight and didn’t care that much for reading. For example, after their offspring left home as adults, Jim Curry or I often traveled with UC when he made trips to new customers. UC drove a truck, and due to his poor eyesight he wanted someone to go along on the first trips to help find and read the signs. These were the days prior to modern freeways with well-lighted signs. He could have read the signs, but he wore really thick eyeglasses that weren’t amenable for darting your line of sight all over the place, especially at nighttime, to find the signs. Afterwards, he didn’t need to find and read signs as the route was memorized. Making homemade ice cream didn’t require 20:20 vision, but to make it time-after-time to the same consistency required fine powers of observation, tasting skills, and a good memory of what did, or did not work well. They certainly mastered this.
To manufacture homemade ice cream an emulsion, foam and dispersion must be formed among the ingredients. If you got all the parts working properly, then you produced an ice cream that had tiny ice crystals, the appropriate amount of dissolved air, and thoroughly distributed and stabilized fat globules. These three areas done properly gave ice cream the appropriate mouth feel and texture. Theirs was the only ice cream I sampled locally with this characteristic. Some years ago I started examining recipes for homemade ice cream, and recently I obtained the following recipe (from Vivian Fodge Patterson, one of our double-first cousins) that was used by AE for preparing their homemade ice cream:
“Mother mixed ½ gallon of whole milk, 1 ½ cups of granulated sugar, a pinch of salt, 3 well-beaten eggs, 1 tsp of vanilla extract. They usually made Banana Ice Cream, and she sliced 3 bananas, added those and then filled the ice cream bucket about 2/3 full to allow room for expansion. Daddy always used blocks of ice because it was harder and didn’t melt as quickly as pre-chipped ice. He chipped the ice block with his ice pick as needed and added the ice and rock salt around the freezer bucket. When the ice cream mixture could no longer be turned with the hand crank, he covered the entire assembly to let it harden for a while. Done with this part, he sat back under the shade tree, rolled himself a Prince Albert tobacco cigarette and relaxed while the cream finished.”
I calculated the amount of fat in AE’s ice cream recipe as being somewhere between 80 and 90 grams/gallon, about 2.5%. This estimate depended largely on the fat content of the whole milk she used, and in those days the fat content could have varied by as much as 20 to 30%, if not more, on occasions when they bought milk from individual farmers who owned Jersey cows. Compared to eight other vintage recipes for homemade ice cream from various parts of the USA, AE’s recipe averaged about 25% less fat and calories and had even less protein than others. Although the eight other recipes in my collection yielded low-fat ice creams, AE’s would have been ultra-low-fat, yet it had superb mouth feel and taste and consistently yielded better ice cream than any I have made.
Unless a commercial producer of ice cream used ultra low-temperature, high-speed extrusion equipment and air-injection systems, it would have been hard for them to easily make a commercial ice cream that was as high-quality as theirs. For decades ice cream manufacturers have used large quantities of whole milk, whole cream and eggs (principal sources of fat and protein in ice cream) to overcome the formation of ice crystals and to produce premium quality ice cream. Some of the homemade ice cream recipes required 9 to 10 eggs/gallon and used Half-N-Half rather than milk. This trend led to the current popular, premium quality ice creams such as Haagen Das or Ben & Jerry’s. For commercial companies, it was probably less expensive to overwhelm the mouth feel and texture by increasing the amount of stabilized fat globules in their products than to pay for the extra processing costs associated with preparing a high-quality, low-fat ice cream. Even today low-fat ice creams sold by premium brand companies aren’t really low-fat compared to AE’s recipe. If the answer was not in the recipe, then what contributed to the superb mouth feel and taste of their ice cream?
As far back as the 1960s, we have been spoiled by icemakers in refrigerators or by a 7-11 on every corner where we purchased chipped ice, or the equivalent of chipped ice. When we were kids there were few such options, at least in our small communities. We purchased ice from an icehouse, and it was either in blocks (25, 50 or 100 lbs per block) or chipped. In our community, the Martin and Norwood families sold and delivered ice to local residents. Generally, the blocks of ice arrived wrapped in discarded newspapers and covered with thick quilts. Once you got it home, the ice was stored in either an icebox or in a tub, and neither was refrigerated. Then we raced against time during the hot weather months to use it before the ice absorbed enough heat from the air and melted. Chipped ice, due to the huge increase in surface area of the chips, was warmer and this was due to the fact that it absorbed heat rapidly and melted much more quickly than block ice. A few times after I was old enough to help him make the ice cream, I went with UC to buy block ice, and he always mentioned to me that we were going to a particular ice house because they had the coldest ice. He never used chipped ice. We brought the blocks of ice home and started making ice cream as rapidly as possible. We chipped the ice as needed to fill the freezer space around the ice cream container, and this meant that the chipped ice he used was a lot colder than most used by others. UC also had a few other tricks that he used to top off the ice cream preparation.
As he added the freshly chipped ice and covered it with rock salt, UC stirred the mixture vigorously for several minutes, almost to the point of building a foam head on the mixture. This rapid churning had a direct impact on the lightness and fluffiness of the ice cream as it allowed a lot more air to be dissolved in the emulsified liquid before it started to freeze. I do not recall others doing this when they made ice cream. Another thing that UC did was also important; he preferred to use the hand-driven ice cream makers rather than electric models. Even if he used the electric models he often had rigged the equipment so that when the electric motor stopped, he could replace it with a hand-crank. Then, he continued to churn the mixture with the hand crank. Once the mixture froze solidly, turning the crank caused the entire assembly to turn. When this happened either Jim Curry or I, or someone of the younger set, were told to sit on the ice cream freezer to help hold it in place so he could continue to churn the mixture. The continued churning motion in the freezing mixture prevented the formation of large ice crystals (coarseness) in the last part of the cream that froze, that portion that is the most concentrated with sugar and fat globules. He also prevented air from escaping the product. Thus, part of UC and AE’s success undoubtedly was related to their understanding that he could overcome the low fat, protein and sugar content of the recipe if he kept turning the crank long after others stopped. If they used fruit in the preparation, then the additional churning motion was even more important.
In this day and age of behemoth football players and exaggeration of size in men, it is worth mentioning that UC weighed about 160 lbs (with rocks in his pockets), but he had an advantage over lots of his contemporaries. These were the times before forklifts were widely available, and as a truck driver delivering heavy construction lumber he had to unload and stack the lumber at a customer’s office, all by hand. Several of us can testify to the fact that it was a rare event when the customers provided someone to help unload the truck. One 2” x 12” x 16’ piece of freshly cut, moisture-laden piece of oak weighed perhaps 125-150 pounds, and 8” x 8” x 12’ posts weighed even more. The trailer was about 32 feet long and stacked with hundreds of these things. Thus, if a fellow unloaded and stacked a few truckloads of these every workday, what resistance could a little hand crank on an ice cream machine possibly offer? What better testimony to their intelligence I cannot imagine than their ability to independently determine how to consistently produce superb ice cream.
1 comment:
I weep for not knowing true ice cream heaven.
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