Chocolate Cream

History

This receipt is documented in Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824), 'considered the first regional American cookbook'. As printed it is terse: 'Scrape a quarter of a pound of chocolate very fine, put it in a quart of milk, boil it till the chocolate is dissolved, stirring it continually, & thicken with six eggs. A Vanilla bean boiled with the milk, will improve the flavour greatly'. Randolph places 'Chocolate cream' not among plain custards but in her ice-cream group, under 'Observations on ice creams' alongside Vanilla, Raspberry, Strawberry, Cocoa nut, and Oyster cream; her ice creams are custard or cream bases that are then frozen, directing that 'The freezer must be kept constantly in motion during the process, and ought to be made of pewter'. So this chocolate-milk-and-eggs mixture is the base Randolph would freeze into chocolate ice cream, though read alone the two-sentence base also resembles a chocolate custard. The book 'contained the first ice cream recipe published by an American author'. Frozen chocolate creams were unusual in this era — most period iced creams were fruit-flavored, and Mrs. Raffald's 1769 English 'chocolate cream' was not frozen. The record does not document that Randolph adapted a specific earlier recipe, nor this dish as a status marker. (The Gutenberg text is an 1860 printing; the work dates to 1824.)

Ingredients

• 0.25 pound chocolate
• 1 quart milk
• 6 eggs
• 1 vanilla bean

Instructions

1. Scrape the chocolate very fine and put it in a quart of milk. Boil until the chocolate is completely dissolved, stirring continually. Thicken the mixture with six eggs beaten together. A vanilla bean boiled with the milk will improve the flavor greatly.