Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [96]
Under the heading “Easy Basic Vanilla Ice Cream,” the writer gives this recipe: “2 cups half and half, 2 cups whipping cream, 1 vanilla bean, 8 egg yolks,2/3 cup sugar, 4 tablespoons unsalted butter.”
This recipe is not easy, it’s not basic and it is not ice cream, it’s frozen custard. The writer gets off to a bad start with me right away when she recommends “half and half.” The assumption everyone makes is that it’s half milk and half cream, but no one really knows what either half is.
I will tell you right now what easy, basic vanilla ice cream is. It is as much heavy cream as you can afford, enough sugar to make it sweet and enough pure vanilla extract to make it taste like vanilla. That is absolutely all you need to make great vanilla ice cream, and anyone who tells you something different hasn’t made as much ice cream at home as I have.
Ice Cream 209
I don’t know why advice on how to make ice cream has been so bad over the years. The freezers they’re selling have gotten a lot better just recently, but articles on how to make it are as bad as ever. When I was young, there were five kids in my summer group. We often made ice cream on hot evenings and it was no big deal. We’d decide to make it at 8:00, have it made by 8:30 and have the whole freezerful eaten by 8:40. The five of us ate it right out of the can with long spoons. It cut down on the dishwashing.
In the days before homogenized milk, about four inches of cream came to the top of each bottle. The five of us came from three families. We’d go to each icebox and take the top off whatever milk bottles were there, being careful to refill each skimmed bottle to the top with milk from another skimmed bottle. We thought this gave our parents the illusion that we hadn’t taken the cream.
We used about a quart and a half of liquid, and if we didn’t have enough cream, we filled in with milk or a can of evaporated milk. So, don’t tell me about easy, basic vanilla ice cream that has eight egg yolks, half a stick of butter and a vanilla bean in it.
Bad or difficult ice cream recipes anger me for an obvious reason, I guess. We all like other people to enjoy what we enjoy, and these recipes are scaring people off homemade ice cream. I’d like everyone to enjoy making it and eating it as much as I do.
The first recipe in this magazine article after basic vanilla is one for “Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream.” What would you serve with that, white clam sauce or ketchup? The magazine doesn’t even give a recipe for the best ice cream to make in August, peach. To make peach ice cream, add mashed peaches to cream and sugar. Please don’t put a lot of other stuff in it.
Part of the fascination of making ice cream is the physical principle involved. I know so few physical principles I get great satisfaction in knowing this one. The outside container of an ice cream freezer is wood or plastic. The container that holds the mixture is metal. You pack ice mixed with salt around the metal container. Salt converts ice to water without lowering its temperature. Any action like this consumes energy (heat). Neither wood nor plastic conducts heat the way metal does, so the energy to accomplish the conversion of the ice to water is drawn from the mixture inside the metal can, and when its heat is gone, it’s frozen.
I’m not as sure about that, of course, as I am about how to make ice cream.
The Andy Rooney Upside-Down Diet
T he two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.
The quickest way for a writer to get rich is to write a diet book. A cookbook is more difficult. With a diet book all you need is one bad idea and a lot of statistics on what has how many calories. If you want to make the book thicker, you put in a whole series of typical meals that