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Ice Cream (Every quart of cream mix six)
In every quart of cream mix six ounces of crushed white sugar, and flavor with extract of vanilla, strawberry, pineapple, lemon or other flavor you may like. Add the white of an egg, frothed. Mix the whole together by thoroughly beating it, and stir in an ice cream freezer, until fully congealed. Water Ice. Water ices are made by making a syrup of white sugar of the proper sweetness. Then add the fruit-juice, the whites of eggs, dilute and freeze in the ice cream freezer. A few trials will enable you to make it to your taste. Try the syrup of a strength, first, sufficient to bear up a fresh egg, so that a section of the egg the size of a ten-cent piece shows above the surface, and you will soon learn how to vary it.
XI. Candy-Making.
CANDY can, probably, be bought more cheaply than it can be made at home. Home-made candy, however, is pure. Candy sold at, or near, the price of sugar is not pure.
Two frozen desserts sketched in the shorthand of a period when every kitchen had a hand-crank freezer and a barrel of ice. The obstacle is not the technique but the raw egg white, which in both recipes goes into a mixture that is never heated at any stage.
- Why this fails: uncooked egg whiteThe frothed white is beaten into cold cream or cold syrup and then frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and a soft-frozen dairy mixture held at serving temperature is a reasonable growth medium once it starts to melt. Modern ice cream custards are cooked to about 170F for this reason, and this recipe has no cooking step at all.
- The water ice has the same problem"Add the fruit-juice, the whites of eggs, dilute and freeze" puts raw white into a syrup that the recipe never says to reheat, and which the added juice and dilution would in any case cool. Neither the sugar concentration nor the acidity of fruit juice is reliable as a kill step. Use a current sorbet or gelato recipe instead.
- The egg-float testBobbing a whole shell egg in the syrup to judge density is a real and once-common hydrometer substitute, but it also means dipping an unwashed shell into something you intend to eat. Syrup density is now read with a thermometer or a refractometer.
- "Six ounces of crushed white sugar"A weight, not a volume: roughly 7/8 cup of granulated sugar per quart of cream, which sits within the ordinary modern range. "Crushed" probably means loaf or lump sugar broken down, still a common household form in the nineteenth century.
- "Cream" in 1900"Cream" then -- unhomogenised and un-standardised, whether gravity-skimmed from the milk pan or thrown by a separator; fat content varied by farm and by season, and would often have fallen somewhere between today's half-and-half and heavy cream, which is part of why the sugar and egg quantities read as approximate.
- "Until fully congealed"In a crank freezer this means churned until the dasher stalls, roughly 20 to 30 minutes with a good ice-and-salt mix. It produces something softer than commercial ice cream, meant to be eaten straight from the can or packed in ice and salt to firm up.
- The candy noteThe closing paragraph is editorial comment rather than instruction, and its point was a live one: cheap nineteenth-century confectionery was routinely bulked with terra alba, plaster and glucose, and coloured with lead and copper compounds. "Home-made candy is pure" was a food-safety argument, not sentiment.
Hand-cranked freezers with an inner can and an outer bucket of ice and salt were cheap and common by the 1890s, which is why a book like this can dispose of ice cream in four sentences and assume the reader owns the equipment. The distinction it draws between ice cream and water ice is the old one between a dairy freeze and a sugar-and-fruit freeze; the whipped egg white in both is there for volume and body, doing the work that stabilisers and overrun do in commercial production now. The egg-float test for syrup strength is a survival from confectioners' practice, used before saccharometers and candy thermometers were household items, and it appears in cookery books on both sides of the Atlantic through the nineteenth century. The closing remark about adulterated candy places the book squarely in the decades of agitation that produced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, when the purity of shop-bought sweets was a standing public complaint.