Kathy makes Mrs Marshall's Cucumber Ice Cream

The Recipe
The Science

This recipe is one I found in Mrs Marshall’s Book of Ices 1885. I went through the 117 recipes, and chose the one I thought sounded least appealing. Everyone says her recipes are fantastic, so I wanted to test her out. I made this - and loved it.

Mrs Marshall really was an astonishing woman. She set up, taught in and ran a school of cookery, inspiring thousands of people to cook exciting dishes for themselves. She patented an ice cream maker and freezer and started and wrote her own weekly paper. As well as being an amazing businesswoman, in a time when it was really hard for women to set anything up, let alone businesses, she was bright, lively and fun, and loved dancing. She is the first person recorded as putting ice cream into cones, and also was the first to suggest using liquid gases to freeze ice cream, after she had seen them being demonstrated at the Royal Institution. What a star woman!

The Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 large cucumber
• 140ml (½ pint) water
• 1 large wine-glass ginger brandy - Crabbie’s green ginger brandy (or ginger wine if brandy can’t be found)
• juice of 2 lemons
• 140 ml (½ pint) of fresh custard
• 140 ml (½ pint) of double cream (or 280ml (1 pint) sweetened cream, or 280ml (1 pint) custard)
• 100g (4 oz) castor sugar
• 140ml (½ pint) water

Instructions

Peel the cucumber, remove seeds and cut into pieces. Put into a saucepan. Add the sugar and ½ pint of water. Cook until tender. Pound cucumber in pestle and mortar. Add a wine-glass of the ginger brandy or wine. Add the juice of 2 lemons. Strain. Add the sweetened cream or custard (or cream and custard mixture). Freeze and stir regularly about every 20 minutes until the ice cream is so stiff it is difficult to stir. Serve in cornets.

The Science

The Alcohol

Alcohol helps to stop fruit and vegetables from freezing really hard when you use them in ice cream. Soaking fruit like strawberries in something like Cointreau, or putting cucumber in brandy, lowers the freezing point of the fruit, so makes it less hard after putting it into the freezer.

Why not have a go at making some of the other recipes featured in the Ever Wondered Food programme? Recipes homepage

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