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Pure Ice Cream
Take pure sweet cream; to two quarts of cream add one pound of sugar; beat up, flavor to taste, and freeze.
This is Philadelphia-style ice cream in its barest form: cream, sugar, flavoring, no eggs and no cooking. The whole success of it rests on the quality of the cream and on getting the sugar fully dissolved before it goes into the freezer.
- Dissolve the sugar first"Beat up" here means whisk until the sugar is completely dissolved, not whip to peaks. Undissolved sugar leaves a gritty ice cream, and whipped cream churns to butter. If it resists, warm a cup of the cream gently to dissolve the sugar, then stir it back into the cold remainder.
- The sugar is heavy by modern tasteOne pound is about 2¼ cups, a good deal more sugar per quart of cream than most modern uncooked ice creams use. Cutting to 10-12 oz gives a cleaner cream flavor, but do not go much lower: sugar is what keeps the mixture from freezing into a solid block.
- "Pure sweet cream"Sweet cream simply means unsoured, as opposed to cultured or soured cream. Use pasteurized heavy cream, about 36 percent fat; unpasteurized cream is what the original assumed and is not worth the risk.
- Chill before freezingGet the mixture to 40F or below, ideally overnight in the refrigerator. A room-temperature mix wastes the capacity of a home machine and produces coarse ice crystals.
- "Freeze" meant a hand-crank churnThe original assumes a pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked twenty to thirty minutes. Any modern churn works the same way; the constant motion is what keeps crystals small. Still-freezing this in a tray will give you a hard block, since there are no eggs or stabilizers to protect the texture.
- Flavoring, given no amountFor two quarts, start with a tablespoon of vanilla extract or the scraped seeds of two pods steeped in warmed cream. Alcohol-based extracts also soften the finished ice cream slightly, so a heavy hand costs you firmness.
- Yield and keepingTwo quarts of cream churns up to roughly three quarts finished, twelve to sixteen servings. Ripen it two hours in the freezer before serving, and eat it within a few days: with no egg yolk or gum, it turns icy fast.
This is the plainest possible statement of what came to be called Philadelphia ice cream, the uncooked cream-and-sugar style that stood in contrast to the French sort thickened with egg yolks. American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century argued the two schools at some length, and the Philadelphia partisans held that eggs masked the flavor of good cream — which is why the word "pure" is doing so much work in the title here. The recipe's confidence that the reader has access to two quarts of genuinely fresh, high-fat cream is of a piece with the instruction to simply "freeze," which assumes the crank-and-rock-salt freezer that is generally said to have spread through American households over the middle decades of the century, making ice cream a home dish rather than a confectioner's one.