Orange Creamcicle Ice Cream: or, Condensed milk makes everything better

Sometimes, things are better when you don't try so hard.

Orange Creamsicle ice cream 1 (14-oz) can sweetened condensed milk 1 cup orange juice concentrate 2 cups half-and-half 1 tbsp vanilla Orange food coloring if desired Mix all ingredients, then freeze in ice cream machine. Note: If your ice cream machine's manual tells you to chill the mixture before freezing, wait until you're about to pour the mixture into the machine before mixing in the orange concentrate. Adapted from Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

I've been flipping through the recipes in my new ice cream machine's manual. Most of them are surprisingly reasonable. I always thought Cuisinart in the 1990s was a high-priced brand for the sort of people who could afford to impulse-buy a Jenn-Air stove. (These days the trendiest of kitchens use massive stainless stoves that look like they should be in restaurants. But in the 1990s, a Jenn-Air was the stove to show your neighbors.) Therefore, I expected to see a lot of impossibly expensive ingredients and unrealistic recipes. 

But it seems the Cuisinart people actually wrote recipes that we can make at home. Some of them are downright cheap even with today's prices. For example, the recipe for "Slushy Kool-Aid" is literally "make Kool-Aid and put it in the ice cream machine."

Someone had to typeset the nutritional content of a packet of Kool-Aid for this.

For this manual, I can't help borrowing our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker's idea of looking through books one recipe at a time. You should definitely have a look at her blog, Grannie Pantries. She shows all the things that showed up on dinner tables night after night, especially the things that food historians have tried their damnedest to bury. (And all the questionable things that were done in the name of "health food" in the crunchy 1970s and aerobics-class 1980s!)

Getting back to the book, the "Easy Frozen Lemonade" is as simple as the Kool-Aid: put lemonade in the machine. I think Cuisinart was trying to reassure you that you hadn't just spent too much money on a frivolous machine. It's not just for ice cream, you can also make slushies for the kids!

Because this is from the 1990s, we have recipes for low-fat (always low-fat) frozen yogurt. For those who weren't there, fat was the dietary demon of the 1990s. If you ever wondered why marshmallows often have "A Fat Free Food!" printed on the bag, I'm pretty sure it's a holdover from the era of SnackWells and olestra potato chips.

I think the massive early-2000s Atkins Diet surge (and its many anti-carb knockoffs) was a backlash of people who had gone half-crazed from several years of cutting every last gram of fat out of their food. 

As an anecdotal note, I remember the first news stories when Atkins was first taking off. Newscasters were incredulously reporting that people were losing weight on a pound of bacon and a half-dozen greasy scrambled eggs a day. Food manufacturers started putting "net carbs" on the nutrition label, and dieting experts got several hours of airtime out of debating whether "net carbs" meant anything. 

These days, anti-carb diets have gone pseudoscientific and morphed into things like "keto." But in the 1990s, we all thought that eliminating fat would prevent getting fat. (Never mind how much sugar went into "fat free" snacks to make up for its absence.) For a few years, frozen yogurt looked like it might unseat ice cream. After all, if it's low-fat, it must be good for you!

 

 

Moving on from the dieting relics of a more prosperous time, the more "laborious" recipes like the sorbets involve juicing your own citrus fruits. The writers seem to realize that we don't always have the patience to refrigerate anything overnight, so they helpfully add that you can stir your mixture over a bowl of ice water "if you wish to make sorbet right away."

On an economical note, I like that the raspberry sorbet starts with frozen raspberries instead of fresh ones. (Like I said, Cuisinart's recipe developers were surprisingly realistic about cost and bother.) That easily cuts the price of fruit in half, and you weren't going to spot the difference after blenderizing them anyway. We at A Book of Cookrye always approve of saving your splurges for somewhere you'll notice. And again, the Cuisinart people seem to have actually intended for people to make these recipes at home.

Aside from the occasional blenderized fruit, most of the recipes in this book are variations on the theme of "stir everything together and put it in the machine." Even the frozen puddings don't involve actually getting out a double boiler and making custard. They use pudding mix instead.

 

In an attempt to prove that ice cream machines aren't just for children's parties, they end the book with two cocktails. Both of them are as easy as the rest of the book.

The frozen piña colada doesn't involve tracking down cream of coconut and whatever else Wikipedia tells me goes into one of those things. Instead, you open a can of "piña colada concentrate" and (barely) spike it. Personally, I would add actual rum instead of a teaspoon of rum extract.

The strawberry daiquiri is slightly more toilsome than the piña colada. You have to put strawberries in a blender. However, the recipe writers use actual liquor this time-- if not much of it. Half a cup of rum may seem like a lot until you compare it to the rest of the ingredients. You'd get faintly queasy from excessive fruit and sugar before you managed to get tippled. I can only speculate that Cuisinart didn't want to be legally liable for the property and bodily damage that might ensue from using their product as a pinch-hit margarita machine.

That's one twentieth of a cup (that is, a scant 2½ teaspoons) of rum per serving. It's practically safe for children.

This brings us to today's recipe. The orange sherbet suggests that we "serve with vanilla ice cream for a creamsicle flavor." This is an impressively subtle sales pitch for using both of the freezer bowls that came with our machine.

After reading the headnote, I wanted to make creamcicle ice cream. My idea was simple enough: instead of making vanilla ice cream and sherbet, I would mix both together and then freeze. Both recipes direct us to simply stir the ingredients together and put them in the ice cream machine, so combining them added no extra work unless you count measuring out a lot more ingredients. 

 

However, I inflicted disaster upon myself right as I was ready to freeze. I double-dipped my tasting spoon and then realized you don't cook this. I'm fairly careless about tasting cake batter because it later gets baked, but we don't do nonconsensual spit-swapping in this house. With great reluctance, I put my ice cream in the microwave (stirring every 20 seconds) until the meat thermometer said it was again safe for everyone. However, our crisis of food safety had turned our ice cream into curds and mess.

It tasted like the smell of a trash can. I tried to tell myself that it was only so bad because it was steaming hot and that it would be better after it got cold again. After all, hot gelatin smells revolting but it turns out all right.

Our ice cream was less bad after freezing, but it still tasted like the wrong side of an expiration date. I quietly thanked the nearest available gods that no one was home to see me dump an entire batch down the drain.

However, I couldn't help thinking about how good this had tasted before I cooked it to death. So, naturally, I made it again without double-dipping my spoon and introducing microbes. The mixture tasted a lot better because I didn't have to cook it, which was such a relief. I had been faintly worried that my brilliant idea was an inherently rancid recipe.

Our uncooked half-sherbet turned out all right wasn't anywhere near what I wanted. It tasted diluted, like fruit punch after all the ice has melted into it. I couldn't decide whether to save the rest or not. It wasn't bad, but I didn't know if it was good enough.

As I discreetly sent more ice cream down the drain, I decided I was overthinking the recipe. Why not forget the sherbet and add orange concentrate to the vanilla ice cream I've been making all this time? 

You need to add food coloring to make it look like this.

Yes. Yes it does. It tasted like pure happiness. This came out exactly how I wanted. I should have taken the easier route the first time. This tastes just like a creamcicle and is nearly no effort to make. (Well, no effort aside from having to use an ice cream machine.) If you have an ice cream machine, I think you owe it to yourself.

Pineapple Water Ice: So easy, but so good

Pineapple juice is too good to throw away.

Pineapple Water Ice ⅔ cup sugar ⅔ cup water 1 cup pineapple juice Mix the sugar and water in a saucepan. Boil and stir until dissolved and clear. Measure out one cup of this syrup and add it to the pineapple juice while still hot. Freeze in an ice cream machine. (Depending on your machine's directions, you may need to chill the mixture first.) Ginger-Pineapple Water Ice: Make the syrup with ginger tea instead of water. Note: You can easily adjust this for however much pineapple juice you have (say, if you're making a small batch using the juice you drained off a can of pineapple). Just use equal amounts of juice and syrup. Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

When a recipe starts with draining a can of pineapple, I hate discarding the juice. I often drink it on ice, but this time I decided to put the juice in the fridge until I decided what to do with it. I might have put it in cake batter, but that would require turning on the oven in this horrible heat. Then I realized: We can make water ice!

Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

Eliza Leslie (or, as she billed herself on her own title pages, Miss Leslie of Philadelphia) appended a lot of water ices to the end of her cookbook as the editions kept going. Actually, she tacked on a lot of unsorted recipes over the years. (Eventually, she decided that had added so many that she just wrote another book.)

It's very fitting that a proudly Philadelphian cookbook writer would have so many water ices in her book. It's still a popular hot-weather treat in Philadelphia to this day. 

Getting to today's recipe, I always thought they were too expensive to eat in Miss Leslie's time. But her book has recipes for preserved pineapples (she preserves them whole with the green tops still attached), pineapple ice cream, iced pineapple lemonade, and today's pineapple water ice. I don't know if she included such extravagances for the sake of wealthier people who bought her book, or if pineapples were more affordable than I thought.

Now that we don't need to squeeze the juice out of a pineapple or skim the scum from of our sugar (back then, you had to get the dead bugs and detritus out of sugar every time you cooked), this recipe is ridiculously fast to make. We start off by making a syrup with a little bit of water and almost enough sugar for my cornflakes when I was six.

At this point, we only needed to add the pineapple juice to the syrup and start the ice cream machine. Really, I was going to call this recipe a hump-day quickie were it not for setting up the ice cream machine.

That's it. We're done.

While we're waiting for our pineapple ice to get cold enough to freeze, let's chat about the new machine. I have a mixed relationship with it.

On one hand, having to put those bowls in the freezer is annoying, though they don't take up any more space than a bag of ice. On the other hand, it is nice not to have to buy ice and hope it doesn't melt in the car.

However, the freezer bowls only have so much cold to give. With the usual kind of ice cream maker, you can repack half-frozen ice cream in a fresh round of ice and salt if the first round doesn't do it. With this one, you're kind of screwed if your ice cream doesn't freeze the first time. This means that not only must you remember to put the little bowls in the freezer beforehand, you also have to refrigerate your ice cream overnight. Cuisinart gives us no spontaneity.

 

But even if this machine isn't all I ever wanted, it does appeal to the part of me that used to open the washer and watch the laundry. (Well, I shouldn't say "used to.")

One of these days I'm going to dribble hot fudge sauce in there right before I turn off the motor.

I thought about adding some food coloring to make our water ice look more like it came from a pineapple, but then I decided not to bother. The wan-looking yellow I got "naturally" (if canned pineapple is natural) would be fine--- yellow snow jokes aside. But to my surprise, this froze into a beautiful snowy white. It just shows that we should always trust Miss Leslie except when she's boiling vegetables beyond their death. 

 

As I was getting the water ice out of the machine, I realized that I should have added some ginger to it. We've learned from my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings that pineapple and ginger go almost shockingly well together. But then again, Miss Leslie didn't put any ginger in her pineapple water ice, and she wrote one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. 

I decided to make some ginger blondies just because I knew what I was missing. (The recipe is simple: add a lot of ginger to a batch of blondies.) And... these two went together like birthday cake and ice cream. 

I know this will surprise everyone, but pineapple water ice tastes like pineapple. It had the perfect texture, like a Slurpee without industrial chemicals in it. However, I wasn't prepared for how much this tasted like fresh pineapple. Somehow the canned taste froze away. So, I'm going to keep this recipe on hand for whenever I have to drain a can of pineapple. It'll be like a little bonus treat.

Baggie ice cream never worked for me

I made this for six-year-old me.

Baggie ice cream Multiply amounts by how many you servings you're making. 1 cup milk 1 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla About 2 tbsp rock salt Put the ingredients in a ziploc sandwich bag and press closed. Put the bag in the quart bag. Fill with ice, add the rock salt, and press closed. Shake until the milk in the inner bag theoretically becomes ice cream-- though it never worked for me and I ended up putting it in an ice cream machine instead.

The other week, my mother was out of town visiting her grandchild. She asked me to send a picture of a page out of her recipe notebook so she could cook together with the baby. I couldn't help flipping through the other recipes just to see the food I grew up on. In the midst of various old friends' names and other causes for reminiscence, I saw... this.

In theory, you can put unfrozen ice cream in a baggie, put that bag in a larger one full of ice and salt, and shake it until it turns into ice cream. This was a staple activity in classrooms and at birthday parties when I was growing up. And now, after more years than I'm happy to admit, I would like to know: Did it ever actually work for anyone? No matter how long I shook my bag of ice, I only got very cold milk. Some people I knew got a few feeble crystals that melted on contact with the bowl, but I don't remember anyone getting ice cream.

The last time I did this was at a nostalgia-themed dorm event. At the time, I thought that perhaps I would get better results than I did as a daft and impatient child. I didn't, but neither did anyone else. Fortunately, the RA who put the event together had done what every wise parent and teacher did back in the day: purchase a massive bucket of backup ice cream.

Looking at this with a broader perspective than I had at age six, I can see why parents would do this as a party activity. You can keep all of those little hands full and busy for a long time before the kids start whining that nothing's happening in the bag. Also, this is relatively healthy as far as party food goes. Really, it's just a glass of milk with a tablespoon of sugar in it. Your kids probably added more sugar to their milk at home if you let them use the chocolate syrup bottle unsupervised.

But now, I have an ice cream machine that can do a lot better than anyone ever could with a baggie of ice and salt. I wanted to give my present-day self the ice cream that 4-foot-tall me was denied.

Whole milk might be the better choice for this, but I used the same 2% milk that 1990s parents poured by the gallon into their children. I don't remember my mother or any unfortunate school chaperones buying whole milk, and I don't think any of them would have dared. Doctors had firmly banged into our heads that 2% milk would save your children from future osteoporosis, but whole milk would turn them into eight-year-old heart patients. 

 

This started to set a lot faster than I thought. (If only it had done that when I was shaking a plastic bag of the stuff...) Within 5 minutes, I could see the same half-hearted ice crystals that some of my more persistent friends managed to get. And just like all those classroom parties, they were swimming in a melty soup. 

This didn't churn easily as I thought it would. Instead, it stubbornly wanted to coat the sides of the bowl in solid ice. I had to reach through the little hole on top and press the dasher down and into place.

After just five minutes on the machine, the ice cream (it can be so called) had set enough that it didn't move anymore. It just hung onto the dasher in a frozen blob. I was ready to finally taste the success that no plastic bag had ever yielded.

 

Of course, as soon as I removed it from the machine it dripped and melted on contact with room-temperature air. So, I turned put it back where it came from, turned the machine back on, and knocked the ice cream around with a wooden spoon to force it to freeze better. In retrospect, this stage might have gone better had I turned off the motor and stirred with a rubber spatula for a few minutes.

Remembering how quickly this always melted (even before it reminded me upon my first attempt to serve), I had put a bowl in the freezer earlier. This meant our "ice cream" landed like fluffy snow. I know that no parent with a houseful of kids high on birthday cake would have the presence of mind to put twenty little bowls in the freezer ahead of time, but I really wanted to taste success even though this recipe had never let me.

 

So, in the absolute, almost unrealistic best case for this recipe, you get a sort of milk granita. You might want to leave out the vanilla though- it only makes this slightly bitter. If you think ice cream is too heavy and rich, you might like this. However, even success doesn't make this good.

Had this ever actually frozen in a baggie, I think kids would only like it because they made it themselves. So if you're a parent trying to put some novelty on your child's umpteenth glass of milk in the same day, it might be worth trying. As for me, I'm going to give six-year-old me one bowlful of retroactive success and move on to better recipes.

Blue Lotus Cream: They forgot to mention the strainer

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are making a recipe that I've thought about for a long time.

Lotus Cream Juice of 3 lemons 2 cups sugar Pinch of salt 2 lemons, sliced thin  4 cups milk 2 tbsp sugar 1 pint whipping cream Combine lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, and salt. Mix in the lemon slices and let stand for 2 hours. Combine milk and 2 tablespoons sugar in a separate bowl. Freeze, stirring occasionally, until it is mushy. Pour the lemon mixture through a strainer into the milk, discarding the peels. Mix well. Lastly, whip and stir in the cream.* Freeze in an ice-cream machine. *There's no point in worrying about folding in the whipped cream. The ice cream machine will stir it anyway. Mrs Claude Earnest, The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 

The Cotton Country Collection, 1972

It looks fairly easy, doesn't it? If you said yes, then I agree except for one sentence: "Slice lemons very, very thin." When I first saw the recipe, I could barely manage to insert the correct part of a knife into food. Slicing things very, very thin was absolutely impossible. As a reminder, this used to happen whenever I tried to cut up a cake:

I'm amazed I remembered to insert a knife into food sharp-side first.

When I first saw today's recipe, the rest of the directions looked just as intimidatingly difficult as knife competence: putting the milk in the freezer and getting out when it is the perfect consistency of "mush," whipping and folding in cream.... the whole business seemed like such a long and complicated procedure when I first read it and every time thereafter. Also, I realized that no one but me would like ice cream with lemon slices suspended in it.

But thin lemon slices need not scare me anymore. I have gotten a lot better at using a knife. Also, I've become almost fanatically obsessed with keeping the good knife sharpened. I always knew sharp knives are safer in the kitchen, but I grew up in a house where the knives kind of knocked loosely around the kitchen drawer. It took me a while to experience a truly sharp knife.

So, let's start off with the most daunting part of the whole recipe:

That wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. We should all sometimes revisit the things we thought were too hard and see if our skills got better while we weren't looking.

Knife intimidation aside, this recipe lodged itself in my head because I couldn't imagine how it would possibly turn out. It was starting to starting to look like it's going to be like marmalade ice cream for people who don't want to make marmalade. 

Would you believe that even with all that sugar, this was still puckeringly tart? 

After freezing, our lotus cream looked so cute with its little lemon slices peeping out.

As is often my way, I tried a spoonful before putting it in the freezer to firm up-- and found that I really should have taste-checked this before turning on the machine. The lemon peels were hard and almost woody. This wasn't a nice crunch like adding nuts, it was a dental trial. 

I should have known this would happen. Back when I used to make marmalade, I once used a recipe that called for both orange and lemon peels. Long after the orange peels were practically a mush, the lemon peels were still as hard as when I dropped them into the pot.

Back to the lotus cream, I had thought that perhaps sugar would penetrate them and do something, but instead I had made ice cream that you couldn't safely eat. I know the recipe says to slice the lemons "very, very thin" and perhaps I'm just not that good with a knife, but I don't think better slicing would have fixed this. Unfortunately, the ice cream also tasted good enough to keep. So, I put it through a sieve and back into the machine.

This is an act of culinary salvage.

By this point, the kitchen mess had finally gotten to me (we had racked up a lot of countertop splats and sticky spots by this point). The stress of future wipedowns combined with the futility of our our super-special thinly sliced lemon peels was too much vexation for one dessert. So, I therapeutically dyed the ice cream blue.

This is actually pretty good if you don't put a lot of raw lemon peels into it. Soaking the peels in sugar sludge gave the ice cream a depth of flavor and a really nice kick. But you should strain them out before anything goes into the ice cream machine.

 

Coffee Ice Cream: Wheeee!

Today, we're playing with our new toy!

Coffee Ice Cream 1⅓ cups (14-oz can*) sweetened condensed milk 2 cups half-and-half 1 cup water 1 tablespoon instant coffee 1 tablespoon vanilla Dissolve the coffee in the water (You can warm the water in the microwave if you need to, but my coffee dissolved in water right out of the tap.) Mix all ingredients, then put in an ice cream machine and freeze until done. Transfer to a storage container and put in the kitchen freezer until firm. For vanilla ice cream, omit the coffee. For chocolate ice cream, omit coffee and melt 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate in the condensed milk. You can microwave it, stopping in stirring every 20 seconds, until the chocolate is melted. Or, you can use a double boiler. *The original recipe calls for a 15-oz can, but it seems Borden did a bit of recreational shrinkflation and nipped one ounce away from the cans. This recipe didn't mind the loss, but you should still be bothered. Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

I make this ice cream recipe out of a Borden condensed milk handout more often than any other.  Everyone wants this one over and over again. On one hand, it's nice when everyone wants you to make something where the instructions are just "stir everything together." (If I never hear "I thought we'd do chicken marsala tonight" again...) On the other hand, it's almost insulting for the same reason.

Borden's Eagle Brand Magic Recipes, 1964

The instructions may look daunting because they're so long, but that's because the writers decided to write out every single detail of using an ice cream machine. They end with the direction to "Cover freezer with burlap, heavy paper or carpet until serving time." Did everyone have carpet scraps lying around the house back then?

Regardless of whether we're temporarily unseating the welcome mat for the sake of ripening ice cream, we're trying a variation that The Nostalgic Cook suggested the first time we posted this recipe: add a spoonful of instant coffee. 

Now, when I got my new ice cream machine, I didn't think anything of it still being in the box. I used to believe people who keep their kitchen gadgets in the original box were being stupid and snobby, like all the people my age who have shrines of still-in-box action figures. But now, I see why you'd do it. After all, you need to store your doodads in something, and each one came with a box that's just the right size. So when I saw this was still in the original packaging, I simply figured the previous owner always put it neatly away. Then the box exploded styrofoam inserts all over the countertop.

After unpacking and examining, I don't think someone bought it in the late 1990s and never touched it. The ice cream scoop was still in its box with the tissue paper.

Also, this thing is so old that neither the registration card nor the instructions have a website on them. 

How long has it been since you got a mail-in registration card with something like an ice cream maker?

Aesthetically, you can tell it comes from a more prosperous time. They printed things like "EXTRA VALUE!" in cheery-colored text on the box--- twice. 

In the 1990s, we still put colors on our packaging. These days, everything is black, white, and gray.

Getting to the recipe, I couldn't decide if I wanted vanilla or coffee ice cream. Then I remembered that our machine came with two of those ice-pack bowls.

I do like how instant coffee is just as good as brewing it yourself in recipes like this. Or maybe I have a tragically undereducated taste for coffee since I almost never drink the stuff.

I'm going to have to get the hang of figuring out when this machine is done. But for today, I decided it was ready when our ice cream stopped moving. 

It turns out that letting your ice cream keep churning for extra time doesn't make it come out firmer or better. It just means that more of it turns into solid ice on the side of the machine. 

This is what learning looks like.

This tasted like a cup of coffee made to A Book of Cookrye standards. In other words, it's like an iced coffee-- the kind with lots of syrup and whipped cream. I absolutely loved it. 

Putting Eggnog Into An Ice Cream Machine

Happy Boxing Day, everyone! For those who celebrate Christmas, it's time to put all those holiday worries away. And regardless of you got out any decorations this year, 'tis the season for discounted eggnog!

So, a while ago Marcus tried eggnog for the first time and said "This tastes like melted ice cream." We never followed up on that. At the time we didn't have an ice cream maker, and then we simply moved on to more entertaining culinary territory. But today I wanted to finally see if this works or not. 

 

This machine had the most passive-aggressive warning sticker I've seen.

I was surprised at how well the eggnog whipped up as it froze.

Eggnog may taste like melted ice cream when you drink it, but it doesn't turn into decent ice cream. It had little bits of ice grit, but not the good kind of ice grit that comes in sorbet or water ice. And it became unexpectedly bland after it got cold. I thought it'd be something like a cinnamon-spice ice cream, but really it just tasted cheap.

But all was not lost. We simply let the eggnog melt back to its natural state and then consumed it as the food industry intended.