The Queen of the Ices, no not her,
this lady Agnes Bertha Marshall one of history's greatest culinary entrepreneurs,
and author of hundreds of recipes including this one
for cucumber ice cream.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as we make Victorian cucumber ice cream
this time on Tasting History.
So yes this recipe is for a rather interesting ice cream flavor but
by no means is it Agnes Marshall's craziest ice cream recipe.
I figured it was just crazy enough that you might actually try it.
"Cucumber Cream Ice. Peel and remove the seeds from the cucumber,
and to 1 large-sized cucumber add 4 ounces of sugar and a half pint of water. Cook till tender,
then pound and add to it a wine glass of ginger brandy and a little green coloring, and the
juice of two lemons pass through a tami and add this to one pint of sweetened cream or custard.
Freeze and finish as usual."
So one ingredient here needs a little explanation and that is the green coloring.
Now she actually in later recipes says to use
her version of green coloring which she says is non-toxic
and she has to say that because throughout much of the 19th century
many of the food colorings were very toxic.
See vegetable food dyes had been around for centuries
but by the 19th century they started to lose popularity in favor of something that could give you really vibrant colors
like copper salts, mercury laced vermilion, or even the famous Scheele's green.
So the 1970s had avocado green,
the 1990s was all about beige,
but the 19th century THE color was Scheele's green.
Developed by chemist Carl Scheele it was used to dye clothes, paint, wallpaper, drapes, and even food.
The only issue was it was extremely high in arsenic
and so often when women wore the clothes they would get sick,
and it's even thought that it may have led to the cancer that killed Napoleon Bonaparte
as the walls of his house of exile on Saint Helena were wallpapered Scheele green.
And there are several cases of it being used to dye food.
There was actually one time where it killed three dinner guests, so no matter what you use make sure it's non-toxic,
you want to stay nice and healthy. And another way to eat nice and healthy
is by ordering from today's sponsor Hellofresh.
With 50 weekly options that are constantly changing Hellofresh has meals for the pescetarian, the vegetarian
and fit and wholesome, as well as a whole host of other delicious meals
like the chicken spaghetti bolognese that I made last night.
See I love Hellofresh because all of the ingredients come delivered to my door pre-proportioned
which cuts way down on prep time which is my least favorite part of cooking.
With Hellofresh I can skip right to the fun part,
the chopping, sauteing, boiling, simmering, you know the cooking
and in no time at all you'll be at my favorite part of the process the eating.
Hellofresh saves a lot of time and it saves a lot of money because you're not having to buy more than you actually need,
and you're not having to waste anything because you're not throwing out extra ingredients because everything's there.
So give Hellofresh a try by going to hellofresh.com and use codetastinghistory16
for up to 16 free meals plus three surprise gifts.
That's hellofresh.com code tastinghistory16,
and after you eat your meal from Hellofresh you can finish up with dessert like cucumber ice cream.
And for this recipe what you'll need is: one large cucumber.
She's not specific as to which kind of cucumber to use, I used an English cucumber but a garden cucumber will work just as well.
A heaping half cup or 115 grams caster sugar, one and a quarter cup or 295 milliliters of water,
a little bit of that non-toxic food dye and how much you use is really going to be up to you but we'll get to that later.
A bit less than a quarter cup or 55 milliliters of ginger brandy,
and you can use more or less but Whitaker's Almanack says a wine glass
is two imperial ounces which is a little less than a quarter cup.
Also as I've never actually had ginger brandy I might as well give it a taste, right?
Ooh! Smell gingery.
Surprise surprise.
That is gingery.
Yeah that's good though.
A quarter cup or 60 milliliters of lemon juice,
two and a half cups or 590 milliliters of cream, and another heaping half cup or 115 grams of caster sugar.
So first peel the cucumber, then slice it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds.
Then chop it up into small pieces, then put that into a small saucepan with the water and the sugar
and heat it over medium heat for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until it's very, very tender.
Then mash the cucumber until as smooth as you can get, then add the ginger brandy and the green food coloring.
So here is where it's completely up to you how much to use.
Now I'm making it pretty dark because you're going to be adding a bunch of cream which is going to lighten it up,
and I want it to be sort of looking like the cucumber, maybe not quite as dark, because
how she used to do it was to mold the ice cream into the shape of whatever flavor it would be,
so she would get a cucumber mold and make the ice cream actually look like a cucumber.
Sadly I do not have said mold but one of these days, it'll be on my Christmas list.
Either way you can make it nice and light green, or dark green, or mint green it's really up to you.
Then add in the lemon juice and stir everything together, then pour it through a sieve.
So in the recipe she says to use a tammy
but she doesn't say whether it's a tammy cloth or tammy sieve, and elsewhere she's very specific so
I don't know why she wasn't specific here but I used a tammy sieve because I tried it with a
cloth and it didn't work, so go ahead and use a sieve.
Then separately you're going to make your sweetened cream. Now in the recipe she says you can either use sweetened cream or custard,
and she has several recipes for custard.
One is very rich, one is ordinary, one is common,
and one is cheap. They all include either eggs or vanilla or sometimes gelatin,
and they could all work for this but frankly the sweetened cream is is really all that you need for this ice cream,
and she says to make that by mixing the imperial pint of cream with the rest of the sugar,
then mix that in with the rest of the ingredients, and pour it into an ice cream maker.
Now I'm using a modern ice cream maker, and while mine is electric
the one Agnes Marshall used was rather similar, at least in how it froze the ice cream.
The way that we're different is that I didn't invent my ice cream maker but she did invent hers along with a bunch of other stuff.
Born in 1855 Agnes Bertha Marshall would have fit in very well with today's hustle culture.
She always had new projects going and was always looking at new ways to monetize them.
Unfortunately we don't know much about her early life, in fact it wasn't until after she died that her husband
Alfred Marshall told newspapers that she had "made a thorough study of cookery since she was a child"
and that she "practiced at Paris and Vienna under celebrated chefs"
but what we do know is that she was quite accomplished by the time she moved to London in 1883
where she purchased a plot of land and started the Mortimer Street School of Cookery,
and on opening day nobody showed up and she learned a lesson that day in marketing.
A lesson that she learned very, very well. So she went out and put a bunch of ads in newspapers.
She said she was going to teach domestic cooks how to cook "High-class cookery, French and English".
And many of the ads were not aimed at the students but rather their employers:
middle class London families who wish to dine like high society and wish their cook to learn the art of French cookery
which had become all the rage in London.
And within a year she was teaching five to six days a week40 different students every day.
Unfortunately there was only one Agnes Marshall so her business wasn't really scalable
so she had a bit of a think.
Well she had a passion for ice cream but it was an expensive and laborious process to make.
Ice was very costly as it usually had to be shipped in from Norway and the current machines available
took 30 to 40 minutes to hand crank one pint of ice cream,
so she invented one that used less ice and only took three minutes to make the same amount.
She got a patent on it and in 1885 she marketed it
in the opening pages of her first cookbook 'The Book of Ices' from which today's recipe comes.
Well the book did okay but she realized that it wasn't the book sales that were going to make her rich,
it was selling that machine to make the recipes in that book.
And if one product made her lots of money
then two products would make her lots and lots of money so she decided to make
600 products!
Within just a couple of years she was teaching people how to make ice cream using her ice cream maker
filled with ice kept in her icebox and crushed with her icebreaker and made even colder using Marshall's brand freezing salts.
The ice cream could then set in her patented ice cave and it wasn't just ice cream that she was into.
She sold pots, pans, gas stoves, ranges, and almost every other cooking tool you could think of,
and everything was embossed with her name on it.
And then she got into making ingredients! She sold baking powder flavor extracts, rice cream, curry powder, gelatin,
and of course Marshall's pure harmless vegetable colors,
which boasted that the name A.B. Marshall is "cast in the glass of each bottle."
She also offered over 1,000 ice and gelatin molds all branded with her name.
She even had a team who would design kitchens using only Marshall brand appliances
and then travel throughout England to install those kitchens.
In her free time she launched a magazine called 'The Table'. It had recipes, menus, food buying guides geared toward the housewife
or the domestic servant, and articles where she could give her feelings on different things in society
like the low quality of butter in England at the time, and the adulteration of cocoa in the country,
and of course every other page included ads for her products.
Then in a move of brilliant corporate synergy she made a second cookbook and this one often referred to recipes in the
first cookbook so you had to buy the first one if you wanted to buy the second one.
And if you still had some questions she recommended to the reader on page two
that they attend her school for cookery where they could take some classes.
She even started an employment agency for domestic cooks so that those cooks when graduated from her school
could then go on and be placed in some of the best houses around London all the better to spread the gospel of A.B. Marshall.
Well after publishing yet a third cookbook she decided to take the show on the road,
and started cooking for audiences in auditoriums all over England.
The London Times said "In a few clear words Mrs. Marshall explained what she intended to do, and how she proposed to proceed,
and for two hours she completely engrossed the earnest attention of some 600 people,
instructing and entertaining them at the same time.
At the end of the lecture, or performance whichever it may be called, her labors elicited a unanimous outburst of applause."
She was like Julia Child before Julia Child, though only in England because she took the show on the road to the US,
but the states just weren't really ready for her brand of culinary entertainment.
In fact the most flattering article focused mostly on her rather than the content of what she was actually doing.
"Mrs. Marshall is a brunette of fine form and bearing, under middle age
with a ruddy complexion that characterizes English women.
She is a fluent talker and speaks with a marked English accent."
Newspaper definitely sent their B team on that one, but it didn't really matter because
Agnes used the trip as a way to gather American recipes for her next cookbook.
Philadelphia and Chicago style donuts, Saratoga potato chips and the decidedly American corn on the cob.
Though plain butter and salt just wasn't interesting enough for her, so hers is served cold with a mayonnaise sauce
and pureed oysters, but that experimental form of recipe was really staying in line with other recipes that she had written,
cucumber ice cream for example but even that was on the tamer side by the time she got to her fourth cookbook
'Fancy Ices' published in 1894.
Here she features everything from a sweet asparagus cream to a fish curry gelatin, and frozen foie gras souffle.
What's impressive is that almost every recipe in the book includes at least three ingredients
that are only available for purchase by A.B. Marshall,
the woman was a business genius.
The book also included the first known recipe for something like an ice cream cone.
Now the cone as we know it didn't show up until the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis
and there's debate over who was the first person to actually make it,
but a decade earlier Marshall's recipe for coronets with cream
were very similar to an orange flower flavored waffle cone,
though she says that it should be served not held but on its side, but she does say
that it would make a perfect holder for ice cream.
She definitely saw into ice cream's future, but it was just a few years to get to the ice cream cone.
It was a century to get to another idea that she had.
See in 1901, she wrote about something that had just been invented a few years before.
"...persons scientifically inclined may perhaps like to amuse and instruct their friends
as well as feed them when they invite them to the house.
By the aid of liquid oxygen... each guest at a dinner party may make his or her ice cream at the table
by simply stirring with a spoon the ingredients of ice cream to which a few drops of liquid air has been added by the servant...
at picnics it would be invaluable."
Now she never got to put her idea into practice
but about a century later the multi-Michelin star chef and the lover of food history
Heston Blumenthal started making ice cream at one of his restaurants using liquid nitrogen
though probably not at picnics.
Now in 1904 at the height of her culinary empire Agnes Marshall fell off of a horse
and never fully recovered, and a year later just before her 50th birthday she died.
Her books were sold to Ward Lock, publisher of the more famous yet less accomplished Mrs. Beaton.
But sadly they decided not to keep Mrs. Marshall's books in print,
but her husband did keep her school going and kept the catalog of products for sale as Marshalls Limited
and they stayed on sale all the way through World War II.
Lucky for us while her businesses are long since forgotten
her recipes are not, like this one for cucumber ice cream.
So once the ice cream has frozen you can eat it right away,
though in her book she usually suggests to let it harden in her ice cave
either by itself or in one of her molds which you would have to purchase.
They were made of pewter, she had tons and tons of them and like I said they were often shaped like what the the flavor was
but sometimes they could also be shaped as rabbits and flowers, and all sorts of other things.
Again I don't have one but someday... but even without a mold here we are
Agnes B. Marshall's cucumber ice cream.
I put it in the freezer for like an hour and it really really hardened up, otherwise it's kind of more like soft syrup but shouldn't affect the taste.
Let's give it a try.
[Nom Nom]
It's very refreshing, you can really taste the cucumber.
Really, really comes through. I didn't think it would because it's just not that much cucumber,
in fact I worried that the brandy- the ginger brandy would really overpower it, but honestly I
don't taste it at all, probably forego it. I mean you shouldn't yeah add a little bit in there but
I think if you don't drink brandy then it's not going to be a big loss, but really, really good,
very refreshing and really smooth.
One more.
It's just creamy. It is not like a sorbet at all
but it's still refreshing, but it is definitely a dessert. It's not a palette cleanser.
It's a dessert and I think like one scoop would be would be fine. I don't see me sitting there with a
a whole quart, which I've done but not with this. It's a little- it's a little more nuanced.
Now Mrs. Marshall had a wonderful quote that I think is pretty apropos for this dessert.
"The aim of a properly constructed sweet is to convey to the palate
the greatest possible amount of pleasure."
And I think she's done just that. The flavor, the texture,
the level of sweetness. It is sweet but it's not overpoweringly sweet.
I think she's done it. By jove she's done it!
So go make a little ice cream or go buy some ice cream, whether it's cucumber or any other flavor
just because pretty much all ice cream is good,
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.