The Joy of Ice Cream: Condensed Milk (2)

Back to condensed milk.  You might think that giving recipes for condensed milk ice cream (and later other recipes) is a lapse from the high seriousness of blogging about who will farm or what is food processing or whether rice eating creates holistic societies.

Not a bit of it.  Preparing palatable food from the materials that farmers produce is every bit as important (and as time- and energy-consuming and as difficult) as farming.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the constant slog of preparing palatable meals was made considerably easier by industrialized food processing.  Middling cuisines, that is cuisines that offer to ordinary people food that had previously been available only to aristocrats, spread throughout the industrialized countries.

It’s easy to forget just how radical a change middle industrialized cuisines were. The “fresh and natural” rhetoric that has inundated culinary literature downplays the work of preparing meals. Our contempt for housewives’ enthusiastic embrace of industrialized ingredients in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century makes it hard for us to recognize how liberating these were.

Of course, their experiments produced lots of so-so results and some that were quite horrid. That’s just part and parcel of experimenting with new ingredients and techniques.

But experimenting with industrially-processed foods also produced many things we take for granted such as dried pasta and canned tomatoes, without which the American dinner table would be very different.

So to try to re-kindle a little of that awe, I have chosen condensed milk which has been largely abandoned in the United States and Europe. Yet it’s the key to lots of nifty kitchen tricks and, yes, delicious dishes.

And no, condensed milk may not be for everyone, no I don’t recommend using it every day, no it is not a “health” food, whatever that may be.

But it has brightened the lives of millions of people around the globe making hitherto unheard of treats possible.

So let me turn to ice cream, one of the most beloved dishes of middling cuisine, as cherished in socialist USSR and Cuba as in the United States, Canada, Australasia or Britain.  Much was produced on a commercial or industrial scale.

When commercial condensed milk, available from the 1860s, and harvested ice and (later) home refrigerators made it a snap to prepare ice cream at home.

Ginger Cream Ice

The Old Foodie, Janet Clarkson, reproduces this recipes for ginger ice cream from Australian edition of The Milky Way Cookbook published by Nestlé in 1914.  This is a very early recipe. Although it sounds quite good, it’s still a fairly complicated recipe, the shortcuts that condensed milk allows not yet being exploited.

½ pint Nestlé’s Milk [prepared to a formula of four tablespoons of the milk to three-quarters of a pint of water.]

1 pint water

3 tablespoonfuls Ginger Syrup
6 oz. Preserved Ginger
¼ pint Nestlé’s (whipped) Cream
6 eggs

Heat the condensed milk and water together, pour on to the beaten eggs, strain into a jar standing in a pan of boiling water, and stir till the custard thickens. Pound the ginger and rub through a hair sieve, then add it to the custard with the syrup. When quite cold, stir in the stiffly beaten whipped cream, and freeze [presumably with harvested ice in an ice cream maker].

Easy Fruity Ice Cream with Condensed Milk

(Dondirmat al-Fawakih bil-Haleeb al-Murakkaz)

From now on, I’m not giving manufacturers’ recipes but ones from respected cooks. This fruit ice cream is from Nawal Nasrallah’s Delights from the Garden of Eden: A cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine (1999), 553, and is much easier.

One 14-ounce can of sweetened, condensed milk

1 1/2 cups mashed fresh fruit

2 cups half and half

Flavoring and coloring if desired appropriate to the kind of fruit

Mix all the ingredients, and freeze until firm, stirring occasionally, and place in an airtight container.

Coffee Ice Cream

Someone sent me a clipping from the Wall Street Journal with this recipe from Nigellissima: Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes (2013) by Nigella Lawson, aka the domestic goddess.

Put 2/3 cup of sweetened condensed milk in a bowl and stir in 2 tablespoons of instant espresso powder and 2 tablespoons espresso liqueur. In another bowl whip 1-1/4 cups heavy cream to soft peaks. Fold the cream into the condensed milk mixture and freeze, stirring occasionally for about 6 hours. When nearly solid, spoon into an airtight container.

Chocolate Ice Cream

And then from my ice cream reference book, full of history, basic techniques, and off beat, intriguing recipes, Frozen Desserts by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (Grubb Street, 1995), a chocolate ice cream and variations.

Mix together 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup condensed milk, and 1-1/2 cups of whole milk with 1/3 cup cocoa powder. Put in a pan, bring to a simmer, and cook gently for five minutes using a balloon whisk to disperse the lumps of cocoa powder. Cool, and then chill in the refrigerator.

Whip one cup of heavy cream to soft peaks in a metal bowl and stir in the chocolate mixture. Place in the freezer and freeze, beating from time to time. When frozen place in an air tight container.

You can add flavorings: snipped mint or mint essence; chopped almonds and marshmallows; chopped hazelnuts; chopped brownies, or malted milk powder.

Chocolate Malt Ice Cream

Ingredients for chocolate malt ice cream

I can assure you from personal experience that American males who grew up on chocolate malts, my husband in particular, can consume this ice cream in prodigious quantities.

Make the chocolate ice cream mixture above. Place in blender with 8 tablespoons of malted milk powder. Whir until smooth. Add to whipped cream and freeze.

So by now, between this post and the last with Gaitri Pagrach’s recipe for walnut ice cream, you should have a general pattern for a condensed milk ice cream.

Take a standard can of condensed milk, an equal or somewhat greater quantity of whipped cream, and flavorings.

You don’t need a special trip to the store,  provided you have a well-stocked pantry and whipping cream in the refrigerator.

You don’t need to cook the mixture unless a specific ingredient needs cooking such as cocoa powder.

You don’t need an ice cream maker or any other equipment except a couple of pans, a spoon, a whisk, and some containers.

And with a few hours notice, you can turn out a fine ice cream.  Pretty good, no?

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