Ice Cream Made the Old-Fashioned Way

by: leebarzel

Sun Sep 02, 2012 at 18:35:15 PM EDT

Have you ever wondered how people made ice cream before Baskin-Robbins and Häagen-Dazs? The latter's founder was a Polish-American Jew, Reuben Mattus, and he told Joan Nathan for her 1995 book, Jewish Cooking in America, "In those days, we bought the ice from the Great Lakes in the winter and buried it with sawdust in pits in the ground until summer." Last month, my family was vacationing in Scotland, and there I learned how to make ice cream without a freezer. This would be a great project to do with children or for anyone — like me — who's intimidated about using an ice cream machine.

I used a recipe for vegan pistachio ice cream from the May/June 2011 issue of Joy of Kosher that I'd dog-eared for testing. I have my very handy digital scale but not having an automatic ice maker on my refrigerator, I got a large bag of ice (free!) from my friendly kosher grocer, Rob Bender of R & R Produce and Fish. I used kosher salt, which was harder to dissolve, necessitating much stirring and nuking in the microwave.  The result is more soft-serve frozen custard than the hard-packed ice cream. B'Tayavon.