Home › Pastry and Puddings › Frozen Custard
Frozen Custard
This is a nice dish for dessert, and very easily prepared: Boil two quarts of rich milk. Beat eight eggs and a teacupful of sugar together, and after the milk has boiled, pour it over the eggs and sugar, stirring all the while. Pour the whole mixture into your kettle, and let it come to a boil, stirring it constantly. Then take it off the fire, and let it become cold. Flavor it with whatever essence you prefer. Then freeze it.
A plain boiled-custard ice cream base from the era of the hand-crank freezer. Two things need attention: the instruction to boil the custard, and the fact that the original assumes a wooden bucket packed with ice and rock salt.
- Do not actually boil itThe hinge of the whole dish. Eight eggs in two quarts of milk will scramble at a rolling boil; cook the custard over moderate heat, stirring constantly, only until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon, around 175-180F. Period instructions to "come to a boil" in custards were often followed less literally than they read.
- A teacupfulTeacups of the period varied, commonly reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz; read this as roughly half to three-quarters of a cup of sugar, or about 4-6 oz by weight. That is modest for two quarts of custard; a full cup is closer to modern taste, and sugar also keeps the finished ice cream from freezing rock hard.
- EggsHens' eggs of the period generally ran smaller than today's large egg, so eight then may be nearer six or seven now. Whole eggs are meant, not yolks alone.
- Rich milkMilk as sold was unhomogenised and often unstandardised. Use whole milk with a cup or two of cream substituted in for the richness the original takes for granted.
- Straining and chillingPour the cooked custard through a sieve to catch any set egg, then chill it thoroughly — overnight is best. A base churned while still tepid gives coarse ice crystals.
- Flavoring"Whatever essence you prefer" would typically have meant vanilla, lemon, almond or rose extract. Add it to the cold custard, as the recipe directs, not the hot: alcohol-based extracts are volatile and lose strength in heat.
- FreezingThe original means a salt-and-ice churn. Any modern ice cream maker handles this; churn in two batches if your machine takes a quart at a time, and ripen the finished custard in the freezer for an hour or two before serving.
- YieldSomething over two quarts once churned, enough for ten to twelve servings.
"Frozen custard" here means simply a cooked egg custard that has been frozen, which is what American writers would later call French-style ice cream — as opposed to the uncooked cream-and-sugar "Philadelphia" style. The distinction mattered in domestic cookbooks because the custard base stretched expensive cream with cheap eggs and milk, and because the eggs gave body that helped a hand-cranked freezer produce something smooth rather than icy. To a household of this period, a frozen dessert was a boiled custard that happened to be put in the freezer, and the same base served hot in a dish, baked in a pastry shell, or packed in ice and salt. The crank freezer with an inner can and paddle, generally credited to Nancy Johnson, had become common enough in American kitchens that a book like this could say "then freeze it" and assume the reader knew what was meant.