Milk Page 11

  Simmons also had a separate section on puddings, which was not unusual for seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or even nineteenth-century cookbooks. She gave twenty-nine pudding recipes. Eliza Smith included fifty-six pudding recipes. Robert May, who cooked for Royalists and Catholics in England’s turbulent seventeenth century, published The Accomplisht Cook in 1660 and again in 1680. Considered the definitive work on the food of Charles II’s court and the restoration of monarchy, it includes fifty pudding recipes.

  While a pudding eventually became a milk-based dessert, originally it was neither. The early puddings were often made with meat or meat sausages. Suet, butter, veal, mutton, and dried fruit were common ingredients, stuffed together into a sheep’s stomach or intestines. The English still call blood sausage “black pudding.” In Robert May’s 1660 “pudding in wine and guts” recipe, “guts” means a sausage casing:

  Take the crumbs of two manchets [a manchet was basically a roll, a loaf of bread small enough to hold in one hand] and take half a pint of wine and some sugar; the wine must be scalded; then take eight eggs and beat them with rose water, put to them sliced dates, marrow and nutmeg, mix all together and fill the guts to boil.

  Gradually, milk and cream started to be added to puddings. One example is A.W.’s Elizabethan “White Pudding of the Hogges Liver”:

  You must perboile the liver, and beat it in a mortar and then strain it with cream, and put thereto for six yolks of eggs, and grate and put it thereto with a halfe penny loaf of light bread, and put it thereto with small raisins, dates, cloves, mace, sugar, saffron, and the suet of beoffe [beef].

  Edward Kidder’s calf’s-foot pudding from the 1720s stayed in sausage form but included cream:

  Take 2 calves feet shred them very fine mix them with a grated penny white loaf being scalded with a pint of cream put to it ½ a pound of shred beef suet and 8 eggs and handful of plump currants, season it with sweet spice & sugar a little sack and orange flower water the marrow of two bones put it in a veal cual [a thin lacy layer of fat around animal organs that is still used to wrap patés and other forcemeat dishes] being washed over with the batter of eggs then wett a cloth & put it there in tye it up close when the pott boyles put it in boyle it about 2 hours then turn it in a dish stick on it sliced almonds and citron then pour on it sack verjuice sugar & drawn butter.

  Soon pudding could be anything, as long as it included milk or cream, eggs, and sugar. There were barley, millet, oat, and rice puddings; every imaginable type of fruit puddings; chestnut, vermicelli, potato, and spinach puddings. One of the oldest and most popular puddings was hasty pudding. Hasty pudding was made with milk, sugar or molasses, and spices, and it is the same dessert known in New England as Indian pudding, except that the English pudding used flour and the New England pudding cornmeal. There was nothing Indian about the New England dish—the settlers were simply copying a traditional English dish—but cornmeal was an ingredient associated with Indians. Here is one of Amelia Simmons’s three recipes for Indian pudding:

  3 pints scalded milk to one pint [corn] meal salted; cool, add 2 eggs, 4 ounces butter, sugar or molasses and spice sufficient: it will require two and a half hours baking.

  Another very old pudding is plumb pudding. The odd spelling is because the name did not refer to plums, but to assorted dried fruit, especially raisins and currants. This pudding is documented as far back as the fourteenth century, but it may be considerably older. It is very similar to Robert May’s wine and guts pudding. Here is Amelia Simmons’s recipe for a boiled plumb pudding:

  Three pints flour, a little salt, six eggs, one pound plumbs, half pound sugar, pound beef suet, one pint milk; mix the whole together; put it into strong cloth, floured, boil three hours; serve with sweet sauce.

  Puddings remained a common feature of large meals into the twentieth century. The Irish writer James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” is centered on an extravagant midday goose dinner topped off with a “huge pudding,” and as portions were distributed on plates and passed to the many guests down the long table, raspberry or orange jelly or jam was spooned on top. In 1914, when the story was first published in his collection The Dubliners, puddings were still in fashion for feasting.

  9

  EVERYONE’S FAVORITE MILK

  Historians generally agree that Homo erectus used fire 600,000 years ago, though some say the practice started only 12,000 years ago and some believe that it began more than a million years ago. But the use of ice, the harnessing of cold, had a much slower development.

  There are many theories about why humans were so much quicker to pursue hot than cold. One is that fire is easier to make than ice. But that is not true in a subfreezing climate. Another is that humans were less drawn to cold because heat is associated with life and cold with death.

  Natural coldness, such as ice from mountain glaciers and frozen lakes, could easily have been harvested and stored early in human history, at least for those wealthy enough to bear the expense. But for many centuries, humans lived around ice and snow without harvesting it. There was broad debate about the nature of cold, and little understanding of where it came from. One theory held in Europe was that all coldness came from an uncharted island somewhere north of England named Thule. Aristotle believed that the origin of all coldness was water. This theory was not disproved until the seventeenth century, when the chemist Robert Boyle observed that materials that did not contain water could be chilled. He also demonstrated that the coldest part of a body of water was its surface, not its center. That led to the theory that air was the source of coldness, but Boyle also disproved that.

  The earliest evidence of humans collecting and using ice comes from the town of Mari, which stood on a bank of the Euphrates four thousand years ago in what was then Mesopotamia and is Syria today. Tablets discovered there in 1933 describe an icehouse “which never before had any king built.” It also described the ice in the structure as being used up so quickly that though it was used only by aristocrats for chilling wine, servants struggled to keep it stocked.

  According to the Old Testament book of Proverbs, “As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to them that send him: for he refreshes the soul of his masters.” Since this was Solomon speaking, it is concluded—by a small stretch—that he knew of the practice of chilling a drink with ice or snow on a hot day. The eleventh-century Chinese also had icehouses. The Egyptians shipped ice from Lebanon.

  Early icehouses were not houses but sawdust-lined pits dug in the ground. Certainly the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs knew how to chill their wine with clumps of snow. Pliny is said to have invented the first ice bucket, and in the second century the Romans enjoyed a frozen milk dish they called mecla. It is unfortunate that we don’t know the exact nature of mecla, because this may have been the first frozen dairy dish. But it is also possible that the Chinese made a frozen milk and rice dish a century or more earlier.

  A century before this, too, there had been a number of frozen or ice-chilled drinks that were not made with milk. Nero Claudius Caesar sent slaves to the mountains to gather snow that was mixed with fruit, fruit juices, or honey—the first “Italian ices.” The Turks also had iced fruit beverages, which they called sorbet. Persians called it sharbate and Arabs, sharûb. These were generally nondairy, but milk did get into sherbet. Antonio Latini, a seventeenth-century chef for Naples royalty, gave a recipe for sorbetta di latte in his 1692 cookbook. Equal amounts of milk and water were mixed with sugar, candied citron, and pumpkin, and frozen. This might have been the first Italian ice cream, though the high water content would make it seem more like a sherbet.

  Two favorite myths of food history are about ice cream. One involves Marco Polo and the other Catherine de’ Medici, two names that are always red flags for food historians because there are so many erroneous food stories associated with them. The first story has it that Marco Polo brought an ice cream recipe from China to Italy from which the Italians learned ice cream making. The second is
that Catherine de’ Medici brought Italian ice cream makers to France and taught the French how to make it. Neither of these claims seems likely.

  There was ice cream or an ice-cream-like frozen dessert in the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907), and ice cream probably originated in the eighth century, a golden age of Chinese culture. If ice cream truly was invented then, it gets added to an impressive list of Chinese firsts, such as paper, gunpowder, the compass, and printing. But in some accounts, the Chinese learned about the frozen dessert from the Mongolians. Marco Polo may have seen or tasted ice cream while in China in the thirteenth century, but there is no record of an interest in ice cream making in Italy in the fourteenth or even fifteenth century.

  In 1533 Catherine de’ Medici, a daughter of Italy’s most powerful family, was sent to France to marry the Duke of Orleans, destined to become King Henry II of France. Both were fourteen years old at the time. According to the legend, the child bride, wanting to eat well, brought with her a huge entourage of Italian cooks and food specialists. She is said to have introduced not only ice cream to the French, but also the fork, artichokes, and many other Italian items. However, it is significant that she was neither credited nor blamed for Italianizing French food until long after her death, mostly in the nineteenth century.

  By Catherine’s time, the French and Italians had been exchanging ideas for centuries, and if the Italians had been eating ice cream, the French would have known about it. Also, in sixteenth-century Florence, where Catherine came from, there were no ice cream makers. But the biggest problem of all, as pointed out by the meticulous British food historian Elizabeth David, was that documents show that the young bride did not bring Italians with her. Her entire entourage consisted of Frenchmen sent to Florence to fetch her.

  In the sixteenth century, both the French and Italians loved ice and snow, chilled their drinks, and decorated tables with ice sculptures. The Florentines built icehouses in their palaces; the Pitti Palace had snow-cooled wine cellars. In the sixteenth century, a few decades after Catherine moved to France, the Florentine grand duke Francesco was said to drink iced milk with boiled grape must poured over it. Elizabeth David found documents asserting that Francesco also combined frozen milk with egg yolks—which would have resulted in something close to ice cream—but she was unable to confirm that this was true.

  All of the leading early ice cream establishments in Europe were started by Italians. And originally, ice cream was only for aristocrats. In the early seventeenth century, Charles I of England, who was said to love his ice cream, would supposedly not allow its recipe passed on to even his noblemen. Of course, this story is probably no more true than the stories involving Marco and Catherine. Like the Medici stories, this one first surfaced in the nineteenth century, long after King Charles I’s death. He would also have had to keep his secret extremely well, because there is no record of ice cream in England until Charles II came back from exile in France in 1660.

  That same year, Charles II built England’s first icehouse, just beyond the eastern wall of what was then St. James’s Park. And the first use of the term “ice cream” that can be documented was a reference to its being served to Charles II in 1671.

  Ice cream was introduced to Paris by Italians. In 1686 Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli started a restaurant on the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie called Café Procope. It is Paris’s oldest restaurant today. Procopio was one of 250 licensed limonadiers, or iced lemonade vendors, in the city. His establishment became the first to sell ice cream to the general public.

  Ice cream had probably been introduced to French royalty much earlier, however. Some credit a liqueur distiller named L. Audiger with preparing ices for Louis XIV and his court in the 1660s. And François Massialot, a generation younger than L. Audiger and the chef for Louis XIV’s brother Philip II, published cookbooks in 1691 and 1702 (Le Cuisinier Roïal et Bourgeois and Nouvelle Instructions for les confitures, les liquours et les fruits) in which he included an ice cream recipe—though he called it a cheese, fromage à l’angloise. Perhaps he saw a resemblance between his recipe and cheese because he had not learned to churn the mixture while it was freezing and so it came out very dense. Here is his fromage:

  Take a chopine of sweet cream and the same of milk, half a pound of powdered sugar, stir in three egg yolks and boil until it becomes a thin gruel; take it from the fire and pour it in your ice mold, and put it in the ice for three hours; and when it is firm, withdraw the mold and warm it a little, in order to more easily turn out your cheese, or else dip your mold for a moment in hot water, then serve it in a compôtier [a shallow serving bowl].

  Though Massialot was certainly not an inventor nor even the first to introduce ice cream to Paris, he did have a famous invention: He was the first to create one of France’s most famous dairy desserts, crème brûlée, a custard covered with burnt sugar. He accomplished this by applying a red-hot tool from the fire to the sugar-covered top of the custard. It became so popular that Paris ice cream makers started making crème brûlée ice cream—vanilla with caramel.

  Others also called ice cream fromage. The celebrated eighteenth-century French chef Menon, who invented the term nouvelle cuisine, had a series of ice creams that he called cheeses, fromages glacés à la crème. These were poured into molds to resemble various cheeses, including a wedge of Parmesan.

  The French of the time had many ice cream specialties as well. Among them was biscuit de glace, in which the ice cream was mixed with dried cake crumbs before freezing and then placed on a decorative metal plate or paper napkin. Menon loved biscuit de glace because he found the presentation charming.

  The most famous ice cream shop in Italy, and now the oldest continuously operated café in the world, was Florian in Piazza San Marco in Venice. It was opened in 1720.

  Another Italian, François Xavier Tortoni, opened a café selling ice cream in Paris in 1798. The specialty there, named after him, as was his café, was tortoni, made of macaroons, rum, and cream—an elegant variation on Menon’s biscuit de glace.

  In 1750, a Paris café owner known simply as Dubuisson claimed that he was the first to serve sorbets, ices, and ice creams all year round. While he may not have truly been the first, he was certainly one of the first. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the frozen desserts that had once been exclusively summer fare were gradually appearing in other seasons. Doctors saw these foods as extremely healthful and prescribed them to patients. Given the copious amounts of cream in ice cream and the copious amounts of sugar in the intensely sweet sorbets, most modern doctors would probably not agree. And a century earlier, some doctors would have disagreed as well; it had been believed that iced food and drink caused paralysis. (Conversely, there had also been a time when it was thought iced food and drink could cure paralysis.) Hippocrates warned that eating snow and ice could cause chest colds.

  Dubuisson stated that the reason he decided to make his frozen desserts available all year round was because of doctors’ prescriptions. Italian doctors in particular insisted on the health benefits of these desserts. Dubuisson quotes a Dr. Mazarini, who claimed that contagious diseases spread more quickly in Italy during years with warm winters and poor snowfalls; cold helped prevent disease, he said. Another Italian doctor, Filippo Baldini, published a book in 1775 devoted exclusively to sorbetti, with each chapter devoted to a single flavor. He gave no recipes, but cinnamon stood out as particularly healthful. He republished his book in 1784 with a new chapter on pineapple, not because of any new health discovery, but simply because pineapple had become a very fashionable flavor.

  It is not known who introduced ice cream to America, but George Washington was known to be a great ice cream enthusiast. Ten lidded ice cream pot freezers were found among his possessions at Mount Vernon after his death. Washington’s distant relative, Mary Randolph, published a cookbook in 1824, The Virginia Housewife, in which she included six ice cream recipes—vanilla, raspberry, coconut, peach, citron, and almond—along with, true to the period,
many more cream and pudding recipes. It is clear that ice cream was made in her slave-owning household, and she offered a great deal of advice on the dessert. “When ice creams are not put into shapes,” she wrote, “they should always be served in glasses with handles.” She also gave advice on freezing ice cream:

  It is the practice with some indolent cooks, to set the freezer containing the cream, in a tub with ice and salt and put it in the ice house; it will certainly freeze there, but not until the watery particles [have] subsided, and by the separation, destroyed the cream.

  Mary Randolph understood that to make ice cream, the custard had to be churned during the freezing process:

  The freezer must be kept constantly in motion during the process and ought to be made of pewter, which is less liable than tin to be worn in holes and spoil the cream by admitting the salt water.

  That statement was true enough, but Randolph and her contemporaries did not know of the danger of lead, which is found in pewter.

  Here is Randolph’s recipe for peach ice cream. The first instruction is the critical secret to this dish:

  Get fine soft peaches perfectly ripe, peel them, take out the stones, and put them in a china bowl; sprinkle some sugar on, and chop them very small with a silver spoon—if the peaches be sufficiently ripe, they will become a smooth pulp; add as much cream or rich milk as you have peaches; put more sugar and freeze it.

  Mary Randolph’s cousin, Thomas Jefferson (these Virginia Randolphs did not look far for mates; she was also related to both George and Martha Washington and to John Marshall, and while a Randolph herself, was married to another Randolph), was said to have brought back ice cream recipes from France. This is not surprising since he was the original founding American Francophile. He was so partial to French food that Patrick Henry once criticized him for having “abjured his native victuals.”