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Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

The original recipe consists of one sentence about the ingredients and then a long description of a method for freezing it. The reworked recipe is just a fairly normal ice cream recipe with some added rosewater.

> If you recreate the recipe using the original method, please let me know how it goes in the comments!

So really the only thing they got from the recipe is that perhaps rosewater is a possible ingredient for ice cream?

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Food blogs of this nature are cringe inducing. People want to post interesting content but don't want to actually do work to accurately recreate the recipe. The last paragraph also highlights this. This individual "shared the recipe" which was literally providing modern rosewater ice cream.

"I was thrilled to share this recipe with participants in the Clark’s “Antique Ice Cream Social” event last month. During the test-tasting, a few participants who expressed a general dislike for rosewater found that this recipe passed muster. It didn’t taste “soapy” or overly perfumed. (You can watch a clip of me talking about ice-cream making here.)"

I want to say that I understand there is a place for this type of thing, bringing the old out into the light of the future. This type of blog however often runs the risk of coming across as lazy. It's similar to the myriad of recipe blogs where someone uses a recipe and provide high definition photos of the result (credit here for actually creating the food true to recipe) staged in some manner (usually with pint jars, rough wood, and flowers somewhere in the scene). The problem is they aren't actually providing any original content with regards to the actual recipe. No tips on altering the recipe to improve texture or flavor, just a 1:1 reproduction. I'd take a low-def Geocities website with Kenji Lopez Alt content over the type of blog I mentioned hands-down.

That's a bit harsh. How many HN highly voted articles have we seen about a dev excited about caching, bloom filters, CPU timing, arcane C++ trivia, fuzzing or other basic concepts without doing any original research of their own?

Those articles almost always contain a well thought out or unique description of the algorithm or topic being written about. Often there will be an inline demo with visualization. Your response comes across as a survival bias, as I would relate the HN highly voted articles to the good recipe sites. What about the myriad of articles written on those topics that don't end up on HN which are often the copy-and-paste content of another site (eg from Wikipedia)?

I was a little disappointed at the write up too. They're cutting the cream with milk (typical in modern recipes) without explanation beyond what sounds like "I tossed the recipe and adopted a modern one".

There is no discussion of why the old version doesn't turn into a solid block of ice. (Fat content from using straight cream? Short chilling time?)

The interesting thing here would be the texture if you'd actually followed the recipe (after researching fat content of cream at the time).

> I was a little disappointed at the write up too. They're cutting the cream with milk (typical in modern recipes) without explanation beyond what sounds like "I tossed the recipe and adopted a modern one".

Also adding a churning step which, it is explicitly mentioned, wasn't present in and dramatically changes the original recipe.

I can almost guarantee that there was not 3/4c sugar used in the ice cream in the 17th century. Sweets were no where that sweet. They would have just used heavier cream instead I bet (since the sugar helps with texture in the lower fat modern ice cream recipes).

Any idea what the fat content of cream would have been? I know they’ve got single/double cream in England and light/heavy cream on this side of the pond, but no idea what it actually is if you make it the old fashioned way. (Skimming the top off of cows milk?)

It depends a lot on the animal, as well. We owned a couple different family cows; first a Dexter, whose milk barely had cream worth mentioning, and the cream was thin and light, almost like store-bought half and half. Then we had a beautiful Jersey, whose milk was about a quarter cream, the richest, fattest cream you could ask for. (I put on forty pounds while we owned that cow.)

You can get a very rich cream by simply skimming if you let the milk sit undisturbed for a while.

Taking all the visible cream from whole milk that has been left to stand and separate gets you 15 - 20% fat, depending on the breed of cattle and what they've been eating.

That's comparable to what the UK calls "single cream" (18%) and the US calls "light cream" (18% minimum, can be up to 29%).

You can increase that ratio considerably if you take off most, but not all, the cream.

As the article says, the texture is quite different from modern ice cream in that there's a lot less air driven into it.

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