Cast iron and ice cream

I love my cast iron pots for cooking in,especially in the solar oven as they retain the heat so well. I hadn't thought about using them for making icecream. We don't have a freezer but everywhere sells ice here - and we can buy fresh milk from machines in town centres (usually we can only get UHT).  Has anyone else tried this?

P.s. Just the teacher in me - an apple for the first person to tell me with what I have an issue in this video....

It would not be the little girl at the end of the movie having her hands on the meat that she did not take for her own plate is it?

I am not sure where to start with this post as there is so much here to talk about; from ice, to ice cream to cooking with cast iron! Awesome thread Mandy...three apples to you for starting it!

Ice Cream:
Growing up we had big wooden churns to make ice cream like they showed drawings of, and we would go chop ice out on the pond, toss in some salt, and then with the cream we skimmed off the milk from the dairy cows we had, we would make homemade, hand churned ice cream. I have a powered ice cream maker today, but it still tastes so much better than store bought...which is not even ice cream. It has such low dairy content that legally it has to be called "a dairy treat".


Ice:

I live in Maine, and a huge market for us not that long ago was ice. In order to create a market, an ingenious man brought ice cream down to the Caribbean figuring it was always warm, and but would be a great place to market his ice from Maine. It worked, and to this day the Caribbean is known for being addicted to their ice cream. This was great for Maine sailors because it was the safest ships to sail on...ice floats making the ship unsinkable!


Beans:

What does beans have to do with cast iron and ice cream? EVERYTHING. Ship captains needed two markets, something to ship somewhere, and then something to haul home, and in the Caribbean they had sugar cane, and thus Molasses. The ships would haul ice to the Caribbean, and then haul Molasses back, which is why Boston is Called Bean Town. To this day New England is known for our baked beans. and as every New Englander knows, you have to have gobs of molasses in baked beans.

Cast iron:

Now I have made the connection from ice to baked beans, but what about cast iron? Well Maine is known for its Bean Hole Beans. It is where you take a cast iron pot, salt pork, baked beans and gobs o mollasses, and then in a 3 foot deep hole, you put the beans and cover them with ashes and let it simmer for 12-18 hours. It will be the best baked beans you ever had! This was a popular dish for Maine since Logging Camps, located hundreds of miles from civilization would cook for the loggers who ate a staggering (4) meals per day. This cooked was an easy way to cook a lot of food for very hungry men.


This history Buff in me will likewise give an apple for the person who can tell me what catastrophic event took place in Boston 100 years ago that killed 21 people?

Treacle factory incident?

I once cooked beans in black treacle (our molasses) for my Mum and my husband. Delicious?  But a little windy.....

Mandy Launchbury-Rainey wrote:Treacle factory incident?

Close enough I guess. It was the January Molasses Flood of 1919 that killed 21 people when the tank storing it busted open causing them to drown. And who says molasses moves slow on a cold day!

One of those Incidents that sounded funny but really was horrific.  Those poor people!