Making ice cream from a 350-year-old recipe

“To make icy cream… Take three pints of the best cream, boyle it with a blade of mace, or else perfume it with orang flower water…” This begins the 350-year-old recipe for ice cream, “thought to be the earliest recorded in Europe.” It was hand-written by English memorist and cookery author Lady Ann Fanshawe. She lived in England and, briefly, Spain from 1625 to 1680.

In this Tasty video, Kiano Moju recreated the recipe to see what a mid-17th-century-style European ice cream tastes like. She adds some rock salt to the ice to ensure that the recipe works. A freezer or ice cream maker works, too.

Here’s the full recipe, courtesy of the Wellcome Library blog:

Take three pints of the best cream, boyle it with a blade of Mace or else perfume it with orang flower water or Ambergreece, sweeten the Cream, with sugar[,] let it stand till it is quite cold, then put it into Boxes, e[i]ther of Silver or tinn, then take, Ice chopped into small peeces and put it into a tub and set the Boxes in the Ice covering them all over, and let them stand in the Ice two hours, and the Cream Will come to be Ice in the Boxes, then turn them out into a salvar [salver = dish] with some of the same seasoned Cream, so sarve [serve] it up to the Table.