Vanilla Ice-cream

Glace à la vanille (vanilla ice cream) teaches that extraction is not the same as boiling. Before you touch a pan, know the one true thing: boil the milk, take it off the heat, then give one plump vanilla pod twenty covered minutes inside it. Boiling the pod drives away the perfume you meant to capture; patient infusion draws it into every spoonful.

The old formula assumed its crème anglaise, the egg-thickened pouring custard, was already familiar, along with service quantities and a sorbetière packed in salted ice that someone stood turning. Here the complete custard makes about one quart, and a countertop ice-cream machine does the turning. The quantity and equipment have changed because one cook has neither a brigade nor a bucket of ice to tend. The flavoring and sequence have not: one large pod, milk brought to the boil, twenty minutes of infusion, then freezing. One cook, one stove, one evening.

The salt-and-ice bucket and spare pair of arms were scaffolding. They can go. The full infusion, gentle cooking, and thorough chilling are the dish itself, and they stay. Give the covered vanilla its full twenty minutes before you build the custard; that quiet wait decides whether the finished ice tastes deeply fragrant or merely sweet.