While discussing which ice cream flavor we wanted to hand-crank for this year’s Independence Day, we returned to a very old recipe from the bottom of my recipe box.
I first tasted it at my husband’s family reunion where they hand-cranked a lemony ice type of ice cream, which my MIL says is more of an ice than ice cream, because there are no eggs.
On my recipe card it’s merely titled, Ice Cream.
Despite the non-descript title, it’s always tasted…how to describe it…uniquely strong with strong lemon notes that were massively sweet.
Anything that I would query about it was overridden by my husband and his family insisting it was the best in the world…so I kept my ponderings to myself.
Since my kids don’t remember this ice cream, even though it’s all we made when they were toddlers, they were curious how it tasted, now that they were young adults.
So…I was all-in to derive their opinion of this recipe.
SPECULATING…
While I was preparing the base, my flabbergasted son was concerned when he saw 4 oz of lemon and vanilla extracts poured into the mixing bowl.
(Um, you can see the empty bottles on the counter in the header photo.)
Dubiously he inquired: Isn’t that a lot of alcohol that never gets cooked out?
Explaining that every time I brought that up to my husband’s family, they told me I was worrying about nothing.
While we speculated on the age and origin of the recipe, I wondered if it hailed from the Prohibition Era.
Telling my son that alcoholics will resort to extract if they can’t find alcohol, we started laughing that this might be the recipe…as in the Baldwin Sisters from The Waltons.
RECIPE ORIGIN
So…I nonchalantly asked my MIL, who gave me her treasured family recipe, as to the origins of it.
Firmly dating the recipe to the 1920s to 1930s, she said her mother clipped it out of the newspaper.
When I asked about the prodigious amount of sugar and extract, she agreed that the ice cream was quite rich.
(I’m guessing now that all the sugar is meant to offset the tinny taste of too much extract…but the tinny taste definitely exists in this recipe.)
Assuring me that no one ever got drunk on the ice cream, she was very happy that we were using the recipe this year.
RESEARCHING PROHIBITION ERA ICE CREAM
Let’s see, since MIL doesn’t want me to share the family recipe, I’d roughly describe this 1920s recipe as no eggs, two containers of heavy cream, about ½ pound sugar, 4 oz lemon and vanilla extracts…is this Boot Leg Ice Cream!?!?!!!
Extensive research on the internet yielded little beyond an article from Bon Appetit that proclaims: Vanilla extract’s the same proof as vodka or rum…
The article goes on to explain that in the years just before Prohibition, when trade groups and manufacturers, seeing the writing on the wall, realized that the only way to save their industries was to lobby politicians to write in legal loopholes that would allow them to continue operating. –Bon Appetit, Don’t Buy Vanilla Extract at the Liquor Store, Michael Y. Park, January 21, 2015
After my son and I tried to assess the ratio of extract to individual serving of ice cream…we just agreed to play it safe by only ate the ice cream after all driving duties were done for the day!
