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Ice Cream (Two quarts of good cream)
Two quarts of good cream, one-half pint of milk, fourteen ounces of white sugar, two eggs; beat the eggs and sugar together, as for cake, before mixing with the cream; flavor to suit the taste. Place the can in the freezer, then put in alternate layers of pounded ice and salt; use freely of salt in order to make the cream freeze quickly; stir immediately and constantly; stir rapidly as it begins to freeze, to make it perfectly smooth; stir slower as it gets pretty stiff. As the ice melts draw off the water, fill up with fresh layers of ice and salt.
The problem here is the two eggs. They are beaten raw into cold cream and the mixture goes straight into the freezer can, so nothing in this recipe ever reaches a temperature that would make the eggs safe.
- Raw egg, never cookedThis is an uncooked ice cream: the eggs are beaten with sugar and frozen, with no custard stage. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, and the pathogen is not destroyed by chilling or freezing — freezing simply holds it dormant until the ice cream is eaten.
- Long hold at hospitable temperaturesCook the eggs instead -- Any custard-style ice cream made today should follow a current recipe in which the egg mixture is cooked and then chilled.
- The cream itself"Good cream" in this period frequently meant raw cream from a local dairy, which was a second, independent risk. Modern retail cream is pasteurised, but that does nothing about the raw eggs, which remain the reason this version should not be made.
- Reading the quantitiesFor historical interest: fourteen ounces of sugar is by weight, a little under two cups, and the half pint of milk is one cup. The proportion of sugar to dairy is close to modern practice, which is why the recipe reads so plausibly.
- Why so much saltThe instruction to "use freely of salt" is sound physics — salt drives the ice-brine down toward 0F and is what makes freezing possible at all. This recipe gives no proportion, only alternate layers; ratios in old texts vary, with something in the region of one part salt to three or more parts ice often cited.
- Why the constant stirringThe stirring, fast at first and slower as the mixture stiffens, is doing the work a modern churn does: keeping ice crystals small. Without it the result is a coarse, grainy block rather than ice cream.
Ice cream moved from a luxury of the wealthy to a fixture of the American household kitchen over the nineteenth century, and the hand-cranked freezer is the reason. The vertical can set in a wooden pail of ice and salt, with a dasher turned by hand, is generally credited to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s, and by the time this book was compiled such freezers were cheap and common enough that a cookbook could assume its readers owned one and needed only proportions and technique. The heavy reliance on ice also marks the period: this recipe takes for granted a steady supply of pounded ice and rock salt, the product of a large commercial ice-harvesting and delivery trade that mechanical refrigeration would later displace.