Chocolate Ice Cream

History

La Mejor Cocinera prints a minimal chocolate ice cream: six to eight chocolate tablets (pastillas de chocolate) dissolved in a liter of milk until thick, then frozen in a heladora — the hand-cranked freezer packed in ice and salt that the book describes in its opening note on ice creams. Frozen chocolate long predates this book. The earliest known frozen-chocolate recipes were published in Naples in 1693, in Antonio Latini's The Modern Steward (Lo scalco alla moderna); Latini gave two ices made only of chocolate and sugar. Chocolate was one of the first ice-cream flavors, created before vanilla, because fashionable warm drinks such as hot chocolate, coffee, and tea were among the first items turned into frozen desserts. In 1775 the Italian physician Filippo Baldini wrote a treatise, De sorbetti, recommending chocolate ice cream as a remedy for various conditions including gout and scurvy. Chocolate ice cream became popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Beyond what the recipe itself records, the historical record consulted here does not document when this particular formula entered Spanish home kitchens, who first prepared it, or any social or class associations specific to this dish.

Ingredients

• 1 liter milk
• 6–8 chocolate tablets

Instructions

1. Dissolve 6 to 8 chocolate tablets in one liter of milk until the mixture is thick and well combined. Transfer to an ice cream maker (heladora) and freeze until set.