Raspberry Debacle

After I’d ordered my ice-cream maker, but before it arrived, there was an article (in the Guardian, I think) claiming that ice-cream makers were the most useless of kitchen appliances, with a high cost-to-use ratio springing from the combination of their price (twenty-five to fifty pounds) and the fact that nobody actually uses them. Several weeks of ice-cream-maker ownership has reassured me that this is not the case, but in matters of science instinct must give way to analysis; so today I have chosen to compare my ice-cream maker to a number of other kitchen appliances. This will allow me to work out whether it really is useless, or whether the Guardian is just talking charming nonsense.

The electric tablecloth: No longer available in shops, the electric tablecloth is, er, an electric tablecloth. You can stick bulbs into it and they will light up, and if you spill a drink on it, you will die.

• Pros: an interesting demonstration of the Edwardian idea that electricity is good with everything (compare the home instruction book Things A Lady Would Like To Know, which recommends, for cramp, “Be electrified through the part which uses to be affected, or hold a roll of brimstone in your hand”, and for deafness, “be electrified through the ear”).
• Cons: No longer commercially available. Oh, also the death thing.

A self-winding fork for spaghetti: Like the electric tablecloth, this 1937 experimental model is not comercially available.

• Pros: Spaghetti can indeed be quite difficult to eat decorously.
• Cons: Almost entirely useless; inventor intended it as a joke; early twentieth century novelty kitchen items are slightly amusing, through the magic of passing time, but people are still selling these, zanily no doubt.

The inside-the-shell electric egg scrambler: A needle is inserted into an egg. The electric scrambler’s scrambling process is initiated, and the needle jiggles around for eight seconds. You then have a pre-beaten egg, which you can either crack open and use as you will, or boil to get a homogenised pale-yellow boiled egg.

• Pros: Won’t kill you; apparently not intended as a joke; quite small.
• Cons: Homogenised pale-yellow boiled eggs? What? What?

Duck press: A duck press costs $1500 (expedited shipping not available), and is used for pressing barely-cooked duck until all its duck juice comes out. We learnt about duck presses from a recent programme on Edwardian food (housemate Brendan has already posted about it) but they’re still being manufactured and used; La Tour d’Argent apparently served its millionth pressed duck in 1996 (#253,652 was for Charlie Chaplin).

• Pros: For an extra $60, you can get a duck press with little duck feet; duck press can perhaps be multipurposed for pressing garlic, trousers, Oxford University, etc.
• Cons: Takes up quite a lot of bench space.

My ice-cream maker: £36, compact, batteries included, makes delightful ice-cream and sorbet.

• Pros: You don’t even need to pre-freeze the bowl. You just put the whole machine in the freezer (it’s quite small, but I can measure it if anyone wants one and is worried about whether it would fit in their freezer), and then a few hours later you have ice-cream. Ice-cream!
• Cons: £36 is a fair wodge of money; and while it’s in the freezer the machine makes little shivery grinding I’m-cold-let-me-out-please noises whenever you walk past the fridge. If you’re in the habit of anthropomorphising kitchen appliances (or drawing sad faces on them), you might find this troublesome.

There’s some competition from the duck press, but I think it’s clear that the ice-cream maker is in fact the least useless kitchen appliance, and furthermore the only one that’s necessary for making chocolate polenta cake with strawberry ice-cream.

Chocolate Polenta Cake (requires an electric mixer)
(adapted minimally from this recipe, mostly to make it less healthy)
250ml milk
2.5 tablepoons polenta (not instant) or coarse corn meal
100g dark chocolate
50g butter
60 grams almond meal
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
80g sugar
2 eggs
2 egg whites (if you’re making the strawberry ice-cream as well, keep the yolks for that)
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons strawberry jam

Preheat the oven to 180C, then grease and line two seven-inch cake tins (or one eight- or nine-inch springform pan).

Warm the milk in a saucepan until it boils and froths up, then pour it through a sieve to remove lumps and put it back in the saucepan. Add the polenta, then warm for five minutes, stirring and not allowing it to boil, until the mixture thickens slightly.

Add the dark chocolate and the butter, and stir in until they melt.

Allow the mixture to cool for ten minutes or so, then stir in the vanilla, almond meal and salt.

Using an electric mixer (or about two hours worth of incredible patience and an egg whisk), beat the sugar and the eggs together until they become thick and mousse-like; this will take about ten minutes with a hand-held mixer. Fold a third of this mixture into the chocolate-polenta mix, along with the baking powder, and then fold in the remaining two thirds, first one third and then the other.

Pour half the mixture into each cake tin and smooth the tops, then place in the oven and cook until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean (or with just a few crumbs attached). Mine took about 25 minutes, though it’ll be longer if it’s all in one big pan.

Once the cakes have cooled, remove them from the pan, and sandwich them together using the strawberry jam. I spread some chocolate ganache over the top as well, but the cake is gooey and dense enough that a sprinkle of icing sugar, or nothing at all, would be fine.

Strawberry Ice-Cream With Chocolate Chunks (requires ice-cream maker)
(for the ice-cream)
250g strawberries
4 tablespoons white sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 vanilla pod, split in two, or 2 teaspoons vanilla essence
150ml milk
150ml cream
3 egg yolks (if you’re making the polenta cake as well, keep two of the egg whites for that)
(for the chunks)
75ml cream
75g dark chocolate

Puree 150g strawberries (setting the other 100g aside until later) with the lemon juice and 3 tablespoons of sugar, then add the vanilla essence (if using), put it all in a bowl, and chill it in the fridge.

Heat the milk, cream and vanilla pod (if using) in a saucepan, stirring occasionally, until the milk foams up. Remove the saucepan from the heat and fish the vanilla pod out, and scrape the seeds out into the milk-cream mixture.

Beat the egg yolks with the remaining tablespoon of sugar until light and fluffy, then add them to the cream-milk mixture. Warm the saucepan, stirring the mixture regularly, until the mixture thickens (ideally to about the consistency of custard).

Get the chilled strawberry puree from the fridge and add the custardy egg-milk-cream mixture to the bowl. Stir to combine thoroughly, then chill the mixture before putting it in the ice-cream machine.

Once the ice-cream is in the machine, make the chocolate chunks by warming the cream in a saucepan, then breaking up the chocolate and stirring it into the cream until it melts and the mixture is thoroughly combined. Allow the mixture to cool.

After the ice-cream maker is done, but while the ice-cream itself is still quite soft, transer it to another container and add the chocolate chunk mixture, a teaspoonful at a time. Chop the remaining 100g strawberries very finely and add those as well, and stir (just enough to spread the chunks and strawberries through the mixture a bit) before returning the ice-cream to the freezer to continue freezing.

Offline sources:
Alice Thomas Ellis: Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring: a Gallimaufry, Virago Press