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Ice-Cream (One quart new milk two eggs)
One quart new milk, two eggs, two table-spoons corn starch; heat the milk in a dish set in hot water, then stir in the corn starch mixed smooth in a little of the milk; let it boil for one or two minutes, then remove from stove and cool, and stir in the egg and a half pound sugar. If to be extra nice, add a pint of rich cream, and one-fourth pound sugar, strain the mixture, and when cool add the flavoring, and freeze as follows: Prepare freezer in the usual manner, turn the crank one hundred times, then pour upon the ice and salt a quart boiling water from the tea-kettle. Fill up again with ice and salt, turn the crank fifty times one way and twenty-five the other (which serves to scrape the cream from sides of freezer); by this time it will turn very hard, indicating that the cream is frozen sufficiently. - Mrs. Wm. Herrick, Minneapolis, Minn.
This is a cornstarch-thickened ice cream in which the eggs go in after the milk has been cooked and cooled, and nothing is heated again before freezing. That single step is why the recipe cannot be recommended as printed, and it is worth understanding the rest of it as a document of nineteenth-century freezing practice rather than as instructions to follow.
- The eggs are never cookedThe milk and corn starch are boiled, then removed from the stove and cooled, and only then is the egg stirred in. Nothing afterward raises the mixture above room temperature; freezing does not kill Salmonella, it merely suspends it. A modern cooked-custard or pasteurised-egg recipe should be used instead.
- Holding time makes it worseThe mixture sits at room temperature while it cools, is strained, flavoured, and then churned in a hand freezer for the better part of two hundred turns (one hundred, then fifty, then twenty-five). Raw egg in a sugary dairy base held through that window is exactly the condition under which bacterial numbers rise.
- "New milk"This means fresh, whole, unskimmed milk straight from the cow, unpasteurised and with the cream still in it. Nothing sold in a supermarket today is its equivalent, and raw milk carries its own set of risks on top of the egg.
- "Turn the crank one hundred times"The counts describe a hand-crank bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, where the dasher scrapes the frozen film off the inner canister. Reversing direction was a way of working the paddle against material clinging to the walls, not a chemical necessity.
- The quart of boiling waterPouring boiling water over the ice and salt melts and settles the packing so brine closes tightly around the can, giving better contact between can and freezing mixture. That is presumably why the freezer is then refilled with fresh ice and salt.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of sugar to a quart of milk is about a cup and a bit by modern volume, with another quarter pound if the cream is added. By present standards that is a sweet mixture, which was deliberate: sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps hand-churned ice cream from setting into a solid block.
- FlavouringNone is specified, which is common in books of this kind. Vanilla, lemon and almond extracts were the usual choices; the recipe has the flavouring go in once the mixture is cool.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Minneapolis and Marysville, Ohio, from 1877 onward) was assembled from recipes sent in by named contributors, which is why this one carries Mrs. Wm. Herrick's name and her city. Its ice-cream chapter belongs to the moment when frozen desserts stopped being the work of a confectioner and became something a household could manage: the hand-crank freezer with an inner canister and a rotating dasher was widely available and inexpensive by the 1870s, and commercial ice harvesting put blocks of lake ice within reach of ordinary town kitchens for much of the year. The corn starch here is a thrift measure as much as a thickener, letting two eggs and a quart of milk stand in for a full cream custard, with the pint of rich cream offered only as an upgrade "if to be extra nice." The counted crank turns are the period's substitute for a thermometer or a timer, and they tell you the writer expected her reader to be standing over the bucket, not walking away from it.