Sorbétière in a pail of ice
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The sabottiere(from the French word: sorbetière)is the inner canister used in an ice pail shown in the picture to the right. The prepared ingredients would be placed in the canister with the lid secured. The sabottiere was then placed in a bucket where a mixture of ice and salt was packed around it. When a recipe called for “turning the sabottiere” it meant someone had to manually grab the handle and turn the canister clockwise and then counterclockwise, for whatever length of time the recipe specified.
Ice cream lovers are in good company. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson enjoyed it too. In fact, the first written account of an American recipe for ice cream comes from Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s recipe included two bottles of good cream, six egg yolks and half a pound of sugar.
Like most food preparation in the 1800s, making ice cream wasn’t simple and required one very important ingredient that wasn’t necessarily available year round: Ice. Electricity was still a couple decades away and the freezer even further. If you wanted ice cream, you needed ice (cut from the rivers and lakes in the winter and stored in ice houses for use throughout the year for as long as the harvest lasted),