Pound the ice quite fine. It seems to take longer at the beginning but it is by far the shorter plan in the end, for the large lumps that are crowded in to save the trouble of crushing do very little good and a person may turn a freezer packed with such large pieces for three hours without accomplishing the freezing. The quickest freezing is done with a mixture of fine ice and snow and salt.

The large establishments that have the huge cog-wheeled freezers turned by steam power have ice crushers, a good deal like the rock crushers at the mines. A good and neat way on the smallest scale is to put ten pounds of ice into a burlap sack and pound it fine with a wooden maul or even with a hammer It is soon learned by practice how to do this without immediately destroying the sack.

The rough and ready way for ordinary hotel work is to throw a fifty pound block into a large box and pound it fine with the head of an axe.

Having your ice ready, place the freezer with the cream in it. Put around it in the freezing tub about four shovelfuls of ice and on top of that one spoonful of the coarsest kind of salt you can get - bay salt like that seen sometimes in the barrels of salted mackerel - then more ice and salt till the freezing tub is full, and let there be salt on top. Turn and keep the fine ice and the salt well mixed with it pressed and packed into close contact with the freezer, and in a short time, running from 20 to 30 minutes, the freezing will be complete.

There is a hole large enough to admit a cork near the top of the freezing tub. That is to let the brine run off before it rises high enough to flow over the lid of the freezer; and another an inch or two above the bottom, which is to let out the brine when it begins to raise the ice from the bottom. But the brine from the melting ice and salt should not be kept too low, but should fill up all the spaces around the freezer which the ice is not fine enough to fill. The brine in such a condition is colder than the ice itself, for salt water will not freeze until the temperature is a long way below freezing point of fresh water. This accounts for the ice cream remaining at the bottom of the freezer becoming so hard frozen after an hour or two in the brine. But there must always be ice present for the brine to act upon, consequently there must not be enough brine in the freezing tub to lift the ice from the bottom while the freezer is full.

One can never calculate the cost of ice cream without knowing whether the art of freezing it expeditiously with the least possible consumption of ice will be well understood.

In some hotels where ice cream is made every day the brine thus made of clear ice and clean salt can be utilized, put in barrels in which the cucumbers and man-goes as they are gathered daily in the garden may be dropped so keep them until they are eventually made into pickles.