Ice Cream
One quart cream, one quart custard, made of one quart of milk, four eggs, one tablespoon corn starch; make very sweet and flavor with vanilla. When it commences to freeze add two or three banannas, sliced or grated, pine apple, stir in and freeze. The pine apples or banannas can be omited if you choose.
A two-quart base of equal parts cream and cornstarch-thickened custard, churned and then studded with fruit. The instructions assume a hand-crank freezer and a cook who already knows how to make a boiled custard.
- Cook the custard firstThe text says only "made of," but the quart of milk, four eggs and tablespoon of cornstarch must be cooked together into a custard and cooled before it meets the cream. Take it to 170-180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill thoroughly - ideally overnight.
- "Make very sweet"No sugar is given. For two quarts of base, 1 to 1 1/4 cups of sugar is the working range; ice cream tastes markedly less sweet frozen than it does warm, which is why the direction insists on the excess. Dissolve it in the custard while it is hot.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon in a quart of milk gives a light body rather than a pudding. It was often used to economize on eggs and it also keeps the mix from turning grainy in a slow-freezing churn; in a modern machine it still helps by binding water and reducing ice crystals.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe period appliance is a bucket freezer: an inner canister turned by hand inside crushed ice layered with rock salt, in proportions period sources give variously from about one part salt to three parts ice up to one to eight. Any modern ice cream maker does the same job; the mix must be refrigerator-cold before it goes in.
- "When it commences to freeze"This is the soft, thickened stage - the point where the paddle leaves a trail. Fruit added earlier sinks and freezes into hard shards; added here it stays suspended. Churn a minute or two more, then ripen in the freezer for several hours to firm up.
- Fresh pineappleRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests the egg proteins and can leave the custard thin and faintly bitter. Cook the fruit briefly with a little sugar and cool it, or use canned pineapple, which has already been heated.
- BananasGrated or mashed banana browns quickly; toss it with a spoonful of lemon juice before it goes into the canister. Ripe fruit is worth the wait - underripe banana is starchy and tastes chalky when frozen.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three quarts once churned, or twelve to sixteen servings. Most domestic machines will not take that volume in one go; churn it in two batches.
Ice cream in an American household book of this period is a summer luxury built around the crank freezer, patented in various forms from the 1840s onward and cheap enough by the later part of the century that a church supper or a family Sunday could produce three quarts of it. The custard-plus-cream formula here is the frugal middle road: a true Philadelphia-style ice cream is nothing but cream, sugar and flavoring, while the richest French styles run to a great many yolks, and stretching one quart of cream with a quart of egg-and-cornstarch custard cuts the cost substantially. The optional fruit is telling too - bananas and pineapple were both novelties made ordinary by late-century steamship traffic from the Caribbean and Central America, and cookbooks of the day fold them into old formulas as an easy sign of modernity.