The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [195]
Butterscotch Nut Ice Cream
2 eggs
1¼ cups firmly packed Domino light brown sugar
2 cups milk
2 cups heavy cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup shelled pecans, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons butter
½ teaspoon salt
Lightly whisk the eggs in a 2-quart saucepan and stir in the brown sugar and the milk. Stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture thickens and coats the back of a spoon (180° F. on a candy thermometer). Strain into a bowl, cool to room temperature, add the cream and the vanilla, and chill overnight in the refrigerator.
The next day, toast the pecans in the butter in a large skillet for 5 to 10 minutes over medium heat, stirring often. Toss the pecans with the salt and spread them out on paper towels to drain and cool. Stir the pecans into the ice-cream mixture right before freezing in an ice-cream machine. Makes 1½ quarts.
Packages today are so cluttered with nutritional information, ingredient lists, health claims, and environmental sermons that hardly any room is left for recipes. And the endless list of chemical additives on most packaged foods is enough to send me back to slicing slab bacon at room temperature. Yet food labelers seem able to keep pace with the changing American palate: every yellow winter squash at my vegetable shop has a recipe printed on plastic in English and French and glued to its side. The public is still ceaselessly enthusiastic about back-of-the-box recipes—“multiuse soups” are the fastest-growing sector of Campbell’s business. When manufacturers remove a favorite formula from their boxes, as when Domino dropped the butter-cream frosting from its confectioners’ sugar, consumers flood them with calls. When Milky Way inexplicably changed the name of its miniature fun size bars to “snack size,” and home Milky Way cooks could no longer find the precise product called for in the old recipes, the outcry was so thunderous that Mars was forced to change back the name to “fun size.”
Just before my back-of-the-box mania went into remission, I resolved to prepare the very first recipe ever printed on the back of an American box. Unearthing it was not as simple as it sounds. Until the Civil War, grocery stores presented and sold their food in bulk—mounds of butter and cheese, bins of sugar and flour, barrels of crackers. (As late as 1928, only 10 percent of all the sugar sold at retail came in packages.) According to Waverley Root, the first machine-made, collapsible, foldable cardboard boxes did not appear until 1879, the achievement of a New York manufacturer named Robert Gair, who had previously produced paper bags (which in their useful square-bottomed incarnation were not invented until 1870). And I was looking for a recipe much older than that.
After a long and winding quest, I finally hit pay dirt. The recipe dates from 1802, and it is, as you might expect, a macaroni-and-cheese casserole.
There was a great vogue for Italian pasta among the upper classes in both France and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. Most pasta was imported from Sicily by way of London until Lewis Fresnaye, an émigré from the French Revolution, hired some Italian pasta makers and set up shop in Philadelphia. But cookbooks were scarce. The first one originating in this country, American Cookery … By Amelia Simmons, an American Orphan, was not published until 1796, when the average book cost the equivalent of ninety dollars. So Fresnaye wrapped each bundle of his dried vermicelli and macaroni in a wide sheet of paper printed with recipes for their preparation.
Several years ago Mary Anne Hines of the Philadelphia Library Company discovered one of Fresnaye’s broadsides from 1802 in the library’s culinary collection, and food historian William Woys Weaver recognized and researched its momentous significance. You can prepare this recipe