Sundae worship: the best ice-cream recipe books

I know from experience that cold wet summers do nothing to dampen people’s enthusiasm for ice cream. When I was 16 I landed my dream summer job at a dairy farm. They’d diversified into ice cream and it was an instant hit, with queues snaking down the road, regardless of weather. What started as a brief seasonal job extended into autumn and then winter. Customers would drop in for take-home packs and have a sneaky cone or tub while they were there.

I still love ice cream, particularly homemade – not only is it cheaper, it gives you the chance to experiment. Of course, you can get by without a decent recipe book – I used the booklet from the Gelato Chef I bought for ages – and Italian cookbooks often have very good sections – try Bocca or Locatelli’s Made in Italy for excellent gelati. However, for true aficionados, a specialist book is a good idea.Ben Vear is a strong believer in an ice cream for all seasons. In his book Make Your Own Organic Ice Cream there’s a whole chapter on recipes of “warming” ice creams, best suited to winter, or really, these days, an average British July. Unsurprisingly, a fair few contain alcohol – I quite fancy the Guinness and mulled wine recipes and would be tempted to add a glug of sweet sherry and some spice to the rice pudding ice cream. There’s also a chapter on savoury flavours (Jerusalem artichoke and nutmeg, anyone?) and if we do get some decent foraging weather, he makes good use of sloes, damsons, crab apples and elderflower. There are some great ideas in this book and it’s very self assured. Not surprising really – Ben’s family have been making ice cream for generations.Out recently is the gimmicky Icecreamists. Author Matt O’Connor is also the founder of Fathers4Justice, and while I have every sympathy with him I don’t want a misery memoir / recipe book mash up which is also an effort to pointlessly sexualise ice cream. I have no real problem with his publicity-generating breast milk ice cream, although it’s not particularly original. It certainly isn’t, as O’Connor once claimed, “the most pro-feminist thing of the past 30 years”, especially as the Covent Garden shop which sells it is more fetish club than ice cream parlour. That said, if you can get past all this the book is beautifully shot and designed, and even if they’re generally not that groundbreaking the recipes do work – they’re just a bit overdressed.So keen was I to get hold of David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop I braved the US cup measurements and bought it when only the American edition was available. I’ve used it extensively, not just for its superb ice creams and sorbets but also for sauces, toppings and “mix ins” such as buttered pecans, stracciatella and cookie dough. This is the book which taught me how to make caramel and hot fudge sauce and converted me to what Lebovitz says is quintessentially American, the idea of “bits” in ice cream, which I’d previously thought just got in the way. Some of them still do, but I’m glad this book encouraged me to experiment with the whole concept.

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Best of all is Robin and Caroline Weir’s definitive book, now extended to include Gelati. It has a sciency bit even I can understand and apply, there’s a gorgeous, cartoon-filled history section and constant references to source material. I love the diagrams for milk shakes, floats and sundaes from The Soda Fountain magazine, and the list of Escoffier’s bombe combinations encouraged me to buy a mould (now used every Christmas). As for the recipes, you can skip across continents and through the ages – there are savoury cheese ice creams from the Regency period in Britain, rose flavoured, chewy Middle Eastern ice creams made with mastic or sa’alab, perfumed kulfis, sorbets incorporating every kind of alcohol or fruit you can think of plus numerous vanilla and chocolate ice creams I use as bases for many of my own experiments. Truly a book full of promise!

Of course, we do eat more ice cream in summer, although bizarrely, sales can actually dip when it’s too hot. During the winter the frozen stuff is more about comfort food and evenings in front of the telly, unless there’s a bright sunny day. It’s definitely the time of year I’m more likely to experiment with richer, spicier flavours. If you’re an ice-cream maker are you a year-rounder, and if so how does the season influence your choice of flavours?

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Recipe