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Fruit Ice Cream (Two quarts of milk six eggs)
Two quarts of milk, six eggs, about one and a half pounds of sugar, one and a half tablespoonfuls of Bermuda arrowroot. Cook as a custard. When cold flavor with vanilla. Then add one pound of figs, one-quarter pound citron, and other fruits cut fine. Freeze like ice cream. [218]
A cooked custard base thickened with arrowroot rather than a heavy cream ratio, which is why it wants a long chill and a hard freeze. Everything hinges on holding the custard below a simmer.
- The custardSix eggs to two quarts of milk is a thin base by modern standards. Cook it in a double boiler or over low direct heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon and reaches 175-180F; above about 185F the eggs curdle and no amount of straining will fully recover the texture.
- Bermuda arrowrootArrowroot starch, historically shipped from Bermuda and St. Vincent and prized as the purest grade. Any modern arrowroot powder works; slake the tablespoon and a half in a little cold milk before it goes in, or it will lump.
- Sugar quantityA pound and a half is roughly 3 1/3 cups, which is very sweet even allowing for the sweetening lost to the cold. A cup to a cup and a quarter less gives a dessert most palates today will prefer, though sugar also keeps the texture soft, so cutting it further makes the finished ice cream noticeably harder.
- Chill fully before freezing"When cold" means refrigerator-cold, ideally overnight. A base churned lukewarm will freeze coarse and grainy.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold at holidays alongside candied orange and lemon. If you cannot find it, candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute; ordinary lemon zest is not.
- The fruitCut the figs and citron very small. The recipe adds them to the cold custard before it goes in to freeze; folding them in once the base has thickened in the churn keeps them from sinking. Large pieces of dried fruit freeze to gravel; a brief soak in a spoonful of brandy or fruit juice keeps them yielding.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-crank freezer; period manuals commonly advise something like three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, though this recipe says nothing about it. In a modern machine, churn the base in two batches unless your canister is large enough, then ripen in the freezer two hours before serving.
- YieldThree quarts or more finished, depending on how much air the churn works in.
Fruit ice creams of this kind belong to a world in which ice cream at the turn of the century was still party food: it required ice, a churn, and a strong arm, and the fruits called for here, figs and candied citron, were pantry luxuries bought for Christmas baking. The arrowroot is a thrift measure as much as a texture one, letting a cook stretch two quarts of milk into a rich-seeming custard on six eggs rather than the dozen a true French base would take, and it also guards against curdling. Arrowroot itself carried a reputation for delicacy and digestibility that made it standard in invalid cookery, and "Bermuda arrowroot" designated the top grade by origin in the trade; the Bermudian export business had largely faded by the early twentieth century, but the name lingered in cookbooks long after the source had shifted to the Caribbean and to Asia.