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Coffee Ice Cream
One quart of good cream, half a pint of strong coffee, fourteen ounces of pulverized sugar, yolks of six eggs; mix well sugar, eggs and cream; put into the freezer. Stir thoroughly; when half frozen, add the coffee. Beat very hard and freeze.
This is a French-style custard ice cream that is never made into a custard. The eggs go in raw, the mixture goes straight into the freezer, and nothing in the process brings the yolks to a temperature that would make them safe.
- Six raw yolks, never heatedThe base is mixed cold and frozen cold. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it dormant, and the dessert is eaten without any cooking step at any point. The recipe gives no cooking or heating stage and no guidance on the eggs.
- The long soft stage makes it worseThe soft stage does not help -- A hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer takes time to bring the mixture down, and the recipe has the cook open up partway through to add coffee and beat hard, which slows the chilling further. The base spends that period warm enough for bacteria to remain active.
- Use a cooked-custard recipe insteadModern custard-style coffee ice cream recipes cook the yolk base as a stirred custard and chill it before freezing. Follow one of those rather than adapting this.
- Reading the quantitiesFor context only: half a pint of coffee is one cup, and fourteen ounces of pulverised sugar is a weight, roughly two cups of granulated sugar — pulverised sugar here means finely ground, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today.
- "The freezer" is not an applianceHere this means the churn — an inner canister set in a wooden bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand. The instruction to add the coffee when half frozen implies the cook opened the canister to check its state.
Coffee ice cream belongs to the French, or custard, school of ice cream — enriched with egg yolks — as opposed to the Philadelphia style of plain sweetened cream, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century print both side by side without much comment. Its appearance in a general household manual says something about how far ice had spread: commercial ice harvesting and delivery meant an ordinary town kitchen could count on a block of ice and a bag of rock salt in summer, and the hand-crank freezer had become a standard piece of domestic equipment rather than a luxury. The flavouring itself is simply strong brewed coffee stirred in cold, added late, though the recipe gives no reason for it.