Homemade maple ice cream

Can you see happiness in a pair of hands?

I think so. Especially when they're clutching a pint of homemade maple ice cream, churned from just whole milk, cream, and maple syrup.

I don't know why we haven't talked about this ice cream before. I certainly would never withhold dessert on purpose. I think it's just that it's so routine, so everyday, that I would no more make a fuss over it than I would over my morning bowl of granola. It is my go-to ice cream, and it is so simple that we don't buy ice cream anymore. Really. If you own any sort of mechanized homemade ice cream maker, whipping this recipe up is literally easier than going to the store.

To be fair, it's really more of a formula than a recipe. I learned it from Heidi, over here, who in turn picked it up from a woman named Patricia Wells. You take 2 cups of heavy cream, 1 cup of whole milk, and 1/2 cup of sweetener. (In my experience, honey, maple syrup, and brown or white sugar all work.) If you want to get fancy you can infuse the milk with ginger—ginger ice cream, we've found, makes an excellent accompaniment to pumpkin pie—or add a bit of lemon extract or a pinch of nutmeg. But we usually keep it simple: for apple pie, plain maple; for a berry crisp, honey and a spoonful of vanilla.

Over time, you'll find your own favorites, too. I'd love to hear what you come up with!

HOMEMADE MAPLE ICE CREAM

Maple is the simplest flavor, because you don't need any extracts, and you also don't need to melt the sweetener with the milk.

(If you use honey or sugar, you will need to heat them with the milk until they dissolve, and then chill the mixture until it gets back down to fridge temp. Another thing to keep in mind is that maple and honey both impart their own particular flavor to the ice cream, which is compatible with some extracts and spices but not with others. Sugar tastes more neutral.)

With maple, you can just grab the cream, milk, and maple straight from the fridge (if your maple isn't refrigerated, you should put 1/2 cup in to chill before you begin), pour them into the ice cream maker, and sit down for dinner. When you're done, the ice cream will be too.

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup whole milk

1/2 cup maple syrup

Mix all three ingredients in a bowl until thoroughly combined. Pour this mixture into the bowl of an ice cream machine and churn until thoroughly frozen. Eat some now, but also know that the ice cream will improve in flavor and texture over the course of a few days in the freezer. The maple flavor generally becomes more pronounced, and the ice cream firms up.

The Local Food Report: Gray's Grist

Thornton Simmons sometimes loses his r's. They roll into words like flavor and over the way the water on his mill pond skims down the turbine wheels, round and down. Simmons is a New Englander through and through: he claims ancestors working as millers in the Little Compton area as far back as 1621. He says the work comes naturally to him—that he has cornmeal in his blood.

Simmons is the miller at Gray's Grist Mill—a small, stone-grinding operation with a property boundary so old it was cut in half when Massachusetts ceded the area to Rhode Island in 1747. The mill pond lies mainly in Adamsville, Rhode Island, while across the street, the mill house stands firmly on Westport ground. It's been turning out cornmeal for over three hundred years.

As for the corn, it's Narragansett white flint corn Simmons grinds. The handful of farmers who still grow it say it's a testy strain—two ears to a stalk, eight rows on a cob, hard and dense and slow to dry. But something about the climate, the soil, and the ancient granite stone Simmons uses to grind it down makes it worth it. You used to be able to mortgage your house on this cornmeal, Simmons likes to say.


Over the years, the mill has been powered by all sorts of things: water, a dodge truck motor, a tractor with a power belt, electricity. Maybe, if Simmons gets his way, the mill will be able to go back to water again. The trouble with property straddling two states is that it can make digging out an old mill pond awfully hard: there are two Conservation Commissions, two sets of regulations, two bodies of law to contend with. Simmons has to get it done, though—even with a deep pond, the water build-up will only ever be enough to run the mill for four hours before it needs to rest, fill up again.

The mill is one of the oldest continuous grist mills in the country. The water runs under the mill house, from a man made pond dammed from the west branch of the Westport River, running down from Tiverton. Simmons says there used to be a lot of dam wars—someone upriver hoarding water, the miller downstream with a dry, slack pond. When the water did come, it ran the turbines that turned the stone. Dried, shucked corn went down through the hopper into a feed shoot called the shoe. A stick straddling the stone called a damsel hit the shoe and knocked the corn into the eye of the stone—you need speed in the feed, as Simmons says. Once a year or so the 56-inch diameter granite stone needs to be dressed—roughed up to keep it sharp. Granite is best for cornmeal, french burr for wheat and rye.

However it's ground, Simmons has no doubt about how to eat cornmeal: jonnycakes. These thin, lacy cornmeal pancakes are the ones Rhode Islanders and people from southeastern Massachusetts have been padding with butter and a little drizzle of maple syrup for years. They're simple food, but hearty—honest in a way that makes you taste the corn, the water, the land.

They're easy—just cornmeal, water, and milk—and you fry them in a hot, black iron skillet. The batter sort of dances when it hits the pan, quivering out, flattening into a thin disk with tiny eyelets all around the edge. To get any satisfaction you need a stack—five, six, seven thin cakes with crispy edges and a swath of butter and hot maple syrup running down. Simmons says he likes to serve his with cranberries, so the other morning, I made up a batch with a side of thinly sliced pears and cranberries, sauteed until soft with butter and a little bit of cinnamon. The combination was just right—sweet maple cutting tart berries, soft pears atop crisp corn. I guess that's no surprise; it's simply what you get with four hundred years of cornmeal passed on down the line.

NARRAGANSETT JONNYCAKES

This recipe is for thin jonnycakes—if you like the thick kind, head on over here. An important note about stone-ground cornmeal: keep it in the freezer or refrigerator. Because the stone-grinding process doesn't grind out the corn kernel's germ, or nutrient packed embryo, left out the cornmeal will spoil quickly.

2 cups stone ground cornmeal
a generous pinch of salt
3/4 cup cold water
1 and 1/2 cups milk
oil for frying

Whisk together the cornmeal and salt in a medium size mixing bowl. Pour in the water and stir until the mixture is smooth. Stir in the milk, adding a bit more if needed to make a thin, pourable batter.

Warm up a griddle or cast iron skillet over medium-high heat. Spoon a tablespoon or so of oil into the pan, and let it get hot. Then, taking care to stir the batter (the cornmeal quickly settles), spoon out about two tablespoons of batter onto the pan for each cake. They should thin out and dance as they hit the pan, forming a thin disk.

Cook for several minutes, or until golden brown and lacy on the bottom side, then flip. They won't need so long on the second side—only a minute or so. Serve hot, with butter, maple syrup, and if you like, sauteed apples or pears with cranberries.

The Local Food Report: Swamp Maple Syrup

These pancakes are not lookers. I wasn't even sure I should introduce them to you, in fact, and I certainly have no intention of showing you the batter. That would send you running for sure. But they are tasty, and better yet, they're kind of healthy, too. They're made with cornmeal, rather than all flour—hence the thinness, and the funny yellow look.


I don't mean to make them sound so bad. They do frill out sort of nicely around the edges, and even though they're thin, they're not at all difficult to handle in the pan. They're actually more like a cross between a pancake and a crepe, except without all the ruined batches and fuss.

I found them in the Joy of Cooking—you'd be surprised how many odd pancake recipes they have. I'd already tried the four grain flapjacks, and buttermilk just seemed too plain Jane for all of you. Not to mention, cornmeal is one of the few grains produced locally, a big, big plus.

The recipe was simple. It didn't call for anything really wacky, just eggs and butter and cornmeal and flour and sugar and milk, with a bit of baking powder and salt thrown in. And despite the less-than-stunning batter, the finished product was very good at soaking up syrup and butter, which is always a plus in my book.

Which brings me to today's local food report—it's on the sweet stuff. Apparently, not all maple syrup comes from bushy red trees in Vermont. You can tap trees around here—swamp maples, that is. Most books say it's impossible, but a couple in Dartmouth has been doing it for years. They say the syrup is more vanilla-y, and sweeter, but that otherwise the process is pretty much the same. They tap the trees just as you would a sugar maple, and boil down the sap in a ratio of about forty gallons of raw juice to a single gallon of syrup.

It's a lot of work, between the tapping and collecting and the simmering, but they say it's worth it. Just in case you might have a swamp maple outside, you can go here to find out how to identify it, or here, or even here. It might be worth a try, particularly if you plan to keep making the cornmeal pancakes above. They go very, very well with syrup, and vanilla-y syrup in particular I think.

CORNMEAL PANCAKES

adapted from the Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition

1 and 1/4 cups yellow, stone-ground cornmeal
3/4 cup flour
1 and 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 and 2/3 cup whole milk
4 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 cup sugar or honey or maple syrup
2 large eggs, whisked

Preheat griddle or large casting iron frying pan. In a large bowl, mix cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, mix the milk, whatever sweetener you choose, the butter, and the eggs. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and mix the whole shebang up. Grease the griddle and pour batter on about 1/4 cup at a time. Keep cooking until you have a nice stack of pancakes, then sit down with maple syrup and butter and enjoy!

Bean pot, on the fly

Bean pots can take awhile. In the oven, you'll need at least eight hours, and out of doors, they can even take days.

They're well worth it, to be sure—any homegrown Mainer can tell you that—but even so, getting them in the ground can be a stretch. It was one thing in the days of logging camps; today, it's tempting to forgetting cooking them altogether, and simply crack open a bean bake from the can.

But I prefer to meet in the middle, to make a compromise of sorts. I'd rather not dig a bean pit, but neither do I like the variety from the can. So bean lovers, meet quick beans. I discovered them accidentally—after ignoring a jar of beans for several weeks. They'd been dry and left to soak in a Mason jar, lid on, water cool, and in the fridge. Each night I thought perhaps I'd take them out for tacos, but with every evening came another entree, bean free.

Finally, this morning, I panicked. They must be cooked now, I decided, lest they grow too finicky for hope. I rinsed them in the colander under cool water, feeling them grow soft beneath my fingers. They were very soft, in fact, much softer than the average soaked batch, and I realized it was because I'd left them so long.

I started chopping bacon and onions, and set a cast iron pan on to get hot. I sauteed the bacon first, then the onions, letting the fat soak up from the pan. When both were shrunken and tender, I poured in the well soaked beans, maple sugar, and molasses. Water was next to cover the mix, and I left it to simmer for an hour. Slowly, slowly, the water disappeared. The syrup thickened, the beans grew increasingly soft, and the gentle flavor of bacon and onions began to permeate the pan.

They may not have technically been baked, but my beans emerged on the fly—soft, sweet and delicious.

BAKED BEANS ON THE FLY

Serves 4

Sautee 1 medium onion, chopped, with 4 thick slices bacon, cut into bite sized pieces, until both are soft and fat and onions are translucent. Add 2 cups pre-soaked baking beans (Jacob's Cattle, Yellow Eye, and Soldier beans all work equally well and are sold dry through Wood Prairie Farm in Maine), 1/2 cup maple syrup, and 2 tablespoons molasses. Cover with water and bring to a boil; simmer for 1 hour, or until water has evaporated and beans are tender. Season with salt to taste. Eat hot as a side, or serve for a hearty breakfast with scrambled eggs and toast.

Indian pudding

Technically, I suppose we shouldn't call this Indian pudding. There aren't many things that can be kindly called that anymore, unless of course they've actually come from the east. But somehow, corn and molasses don't sound nearly so comforting as Native American pudding, and so I think we'll stick with the old-fashioned name, at least for now.

My mother has always had a soft spot for the dish. We used to go down to a clam shack along the rocks where I grew up in Maine on summer nights to feast on lobster rolls and steamers. Henry and Marty, the impromptu cooks, always beamed out of the kitchen at the end of the meal, fussing over my sister and me and pushing a paper basket of pudding onto the table.

It was rich, thick, and brown; molasses seeping through the paper and corn rough on our tongues. The pudding came topped with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream, and it was hot, too hot. We almost always burned our mouths with that first bite, cooling off quickly with the cold cream and digging in too soon for another.

I've been meaning to recreate it for a while, now, but it's quite a project for the average day. First you have to scald and stir, wiping up sticky molasses and taking care with the milk, and then there's the oven time—two hours, at least. But when you have a day, it's well worth the work.

It doesn't involve so much as you imagine, beyond the time and the mess. There will be a shopping trip to pay—I used up a quart of milk, nearly all of the molasses, and a good bit of cornmeal in the process—and probably an oven to clean. I despaired a bit at the beginning, as the pudding bubbled and burped, belching molasses onto the oven ceiling, but with one bite I was able to let even that offense go.

It was worth it, you see. The transformation of thin liquid and grain into a thick, sweet porridge is so startling, so delightful, that no scrubbing will deter me again. I can only hope you agree.

INDIAN PUDDING

Serves 4-6

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Grease a large, heavy bottomed pot or baking dish. Scald 3 cups milk in a saucepan. Add 5-8 tablespoons cornmeal, and reduce heat to low. Continue cooking, stirring frequently, until mixture thickens. Remove from heat and add 2 tablespoons butter, 1/3 cup molasses, 1/3 cup maple syrup, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1 egg, beaten. Stir well, until butter melts. Pour into greased dish and bake 30 minutes. Pour 1 cup cold milk over pudding and turn oven down to 250. Cook 2 hours, or until top is brown and crisp. Serve warm with ice cream or whipped cream.

The Local Food Report: Boston Marrow Squash

Ok, so technically this is the round end of an orange Hubbard squash. It's not a Boston Marrow, though the two are look alikes, at least from this angle. While the Hubbard lacks the curved, elongated neck of the Boston Marrow, it could easily pass from behind.

I would have a picture of the real deal, rather than this imposter, but it's been impossible to find. I visited farmers' market after market, farm stand after stand, and to no avail. The Boston Marrow squash truly is disappearing.

But there is one less tangible place I've encountered it. Tucked between the careful pages of local food author Gary Nabhan's book, Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, there it was. In bright and glossy orange, it jumped from the page with startling statistics. Brought to popularity in the mid-1800s, the squash can now be found from only two commercial seed companies: D. Landreth Seed and Heritage Harvest Seed.

Even one of the companies Nabhan lists in his book as one of the last to sell the seeds no longer does. Those have been hard to get for a while, now, the friendly operator informed me. We stopped carrying them a few years back. It's no surprise, then, that the squash are disappearing from our dinner tables.

The time to save the squash, if we decide too, is now. That's the easy part, of course. You simply order the seeds instead of Hubbard or butternut, and nurse the tiny seedlings through the spring. A year from now, you'll serve your friends a stunning pie or soup or autumn gratin, and they'll wonder at the magnificent taste. It won't be hard at all to do, you simply have to choose to.

If you need convincing, Nabhan's written a load of books on the subject. There's Where our Food Comes From, which tells the story of a great Soviet botanist who traveled the world in search of seeds to ward against hunger. There's Coming Home to Eat, on the pleasures and politics of eating locally, and plenty of other more specific reads, too. In case you need to munch while you read, here's Nabhan's recipe for the ancient New England standing dish of Boston Marrow Squash. If all else fails, you can always grab a Hubbard.

THE ANCIENT NEW ENGLAND STANDING DISH OF STEWED BOSTON MARROW "PUMPKIN"

adapted from Gary Nabhan's Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods

Serves 6-8

Slice and dice about 4 lbs. Boston Marrow squash. Fill a large, heavy-bottomed pot half full with squash, and cover with water. Cook over low heat (preferably on a woodstove, where you can leave it to stew all day). When water is largely evaporated and squash is tender, remove from heat and add (to 4 cups squash) 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons cider vinegar, 2 teaspoons ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon maple syrup. Mix well and serve hot.

To see the New York Times' map of Gary Nabhan's 13 food nations, click here. Roll mouse over "Clambake Nation" for a list of 12 endangered foods in our area.

Breakfast, defined

Bog juice.

(n) Definition: a rich, pulpy beverage made from crushed organic Maine cranberries, water, and Maine maple syrup. Delicious chilled or hot.








Honey-bun.

(n) Definition: a honey-drizzled, breakfast sandwich on gooey whole-wheat stuffed with warm apples, toasted pine-nuts, and several raisins.