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Eggless Ice-Cream
A scant tea-cup flour to two quarts new milk; put three pints on to boil (in tin pail set in a kettle of boiling water), mix the flour with the other pint till smooth, then stir it in the boiling milk; let it boil ten or fifteen minutes, and, just before taking it from the fire, stir in one and a half pounds pulverized sugar (any good white sugar will do). Care must be taken to stir all the time after putting in the sugar, only letting it remain a moment, or just long enough to dissolve it; take from stove, and strain at once through a crash towel. When cold, add one quart cream. Flavor with vanilla, in the proportion of one and a fourth table-spoons to a gallon. -Mrs. Libbie Dolbear.
FRUIT FRAPÉES.
Line a mold with vanilla ice-cream, fill the center with fresh berries, or fruit cut in slices, cover with ice-cream, cover closely, and set in freezer for half an hour, with salt and ice well packed around it. The fruit must be chilled, but not frozen. Strawberries and ripe peaches are delicious thus prepared. -Mrs. J. C. P., Stockbridge, Mass.
A flour-thickened milk base rather than an egg custard, sweetened hard and finished with a quart of cream. The instructions are complete but assume a hand-crank freezer and a set of nineteenth-century measures.
- The teacupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern cup, often estimated at around three-quarters of one, which would make a "scant tea-cup" of flour roughly 2/3 cup, about 3 oz. The figure is genuinely ambiguous, so weigh if you can and treat it as a starting point.
- New milkThis means fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and unsoured. Standard whole milk is the substitute; skim will give a thin, icy result once the sugar goes in.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period that meant sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which is cut with cornstarch. Plain granulated dissolves perfectly well in hot milk.
- The hinge: cook the flour outThe ten to fifteen minutes of boiling is not optional. A shorter cook leaves a raw, pasty flour taste that freezing will not hide, and the base must be stirred constantly once the sugar is in or it will scorch on the bottom of the pail.
- Tin pail in a kettleThat is a double boiler. A heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same job, or a heavy saucepan over low heat with steady attention.
- Crash towelCrash is a coarse open-weave linen. Strain through a fine sieve, or a sieve lined with a single layer of cheesecloth, to catch flour lumps and any skin.
- Sugar levelA pound and a half of sugar to roughly three quarts of finished base is very sweet by current taste, though the sugar is also what keeps the texture soft rather than brick-hard. Cutting it to a pound gives a cleaner flavor and a noticeably firmer freeze.
- Freezing and yieldThe measured ingredients come to about three and a half quarts of base, approaching a gallon once churned; freeze it thoroughly chilled in an ice-cream maker, or in a bucket freezer packed with one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice. Figure sixteen or more servings.
- The frappé moldHalf an hour packed in ice and salt is enough to chill sliced peaches or berries through without freezing them solid; longer and the fruit turns to ice crystals. A metal loaf pan sealed with foil stands in for the old hinged mold.
Eggless ice creams like this one belong to a broad nineteenth-century family in which flour, cornstarch or arrowroot stands in for expensive eggs, giving body to a milk base so that less cream is needed. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by named women, is full of such economies, and the credit lines are the point: this is a community recipe file in print, with Mrs. Dolbear's proportions preserved down to the vanilla measured by the gallon. That gallon scale is itself a period detail. Freezing anything at home meant ice — whether harvested from lakes and rivers and kept in an icehouse or bought from a commercial supplier — and a crank freezer worked by relays of arms, so a batch of this size suggests a Sunday gathering or a church social rather than a pint at a time for a family.