PG’s 1st look at vintage ice cream
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Never underestimate the appeal of old recipes.
Trying some old-fashioned ice cream can be a revelation.
As the Pittsburgh Post and the Gazette-Times consolidated to create the Post-Gazette 90 years ago today, one of the immediate results was an expanded emphasis on female readers. The traditional “society” page was expanded to include a page dedicated to “What Women Do, Where They Shop And What They Wear.”
That included a brand new focus on food, and ice cream was there from the beginning.
It was the year General Electric introduced its Monitor Top electric refrigerator; Charles Lindbergh was taking the country by storm following his trans-Atlantic flight in May, and prohibition agents were prowling Pittsburgh for illicit distilleries.
Within six months, the new Post-Gazette had expanded its female-focused advertising and was running columns from Sarah Tyson Rorer, who was one of the era’s best-known foodies. Born in 1849 in Bucks County, she was raised in Buffalo, N.Y., and returned to Philadelphia in her 20s, where she founded the Philadelphia Cooking School. Keenly interested in chemistry, anatomy and medicine, Ms. Rorer is considered one of America’s first dietitians. She was a prolific cookbook writer and served as an editor of Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.
Ms. Rorer was a popular lecturer and radio personality, health guru and syndicated food columnist as well. By the late 1920s, she was tailoring her columns to modern kitchen appliances, including “frozen” recipes designed to be
made in the ice compartment of GE’s new electric “ice box.”
It also was the age of the ice cream social and the rise of soda fountains.
Ms. Rorer, an advocate of using the freshest seasonal ingredients, helped popularize the Philadelphia-style ice cream — consisting simply of fresh cream, sugar and flavoring, rather than the traditional cooked egg custard.
Whether you make them in a traditional crank ice cream freezer with ice and salt or in a new-fangled frozen-barrel electric gadget, Ms. Rorer’s ice cream recipes are incredibly simple, withsurprisingly bold flavors.
Using half-and-half instead of heavy cream in the recipes not only cuts the fat and calories by more than half, it comes closer to Rorer's originals, which often call for “single cream” — closer to our half-and-half than heavy whipping cream. To approximate single cream, use halfand-half for all but one cup of the cream in the recipes.
But it's the flavor that stands out, from traditional chocolate deepened with just a hint of cinnamon to coffee so strong a modern barista would be proud to “burnt almond,” an old-time flavor fully worth reviving.
Just as striking are Ms. Rorer's recipes for water ice: traditional lemon, but also a ginger that put Post-Gazette tasters in mindof a Moscow mule.