McCalls’ Perfect Vanilla Ice Cream
September 26, 2007 by niceties
I was just saying, I knew grandma had a recipe for ice cream somewhere… :)
This is another one of the many McCall’s recipes grandmother wrote down. Check out the rest here.
In my previous posting, I wrote a little bit about the background of commercial ice cream. I was surprised to discover the wide range and easy availability of commercially-produced ice cream by Cold Storage in Singapore as early as the mid-1920s!
My grandmother enjoyed ice cream very much and we usually had a tub in the fridge, but for grandma, it always had to be served very very cold and hard. Melting and soft scoop ice cream gave her indigestion she said. Mocha and coffee were her favourite flavours.
Most ice cream recipes I have come across involve taking it out of the freezer at intervals for beating several times. This recipe has a special trick for making “smooth as velvet” ice cream without the need for re-beating! This tip for saving time and energy would have been very welcome for busy housewives :).
The history of housework and technology in the twentieth century is largely about the amount of manpower needed to maintain the desired lifestyle for a household (such as eating fancy stuff like ice-cream). As technology historian, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, writes in More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, new technology didn’t necessarily eliminate the need for human domestic helpers for housewives. In colonial Malaya (or present-day Singapore/Malaysia), modern technology or not, paid household help was, and still is, very common.
