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Ice-Cream (Three pints sweet cream quart)
Three pints sweet cream, quart new milk, pint powdered sugar, the whites of two eggs beaten light, table-spoon vanilla; put in freezer till thoroughly chilled through, and then freeze. This is very easily made. --Mrs. Cogswell, New York.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no cooked custard base — that folds in raw egg whites and freezes them. That is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- The raw egg whitesThe whites go in beaten and uncooked, and nothing in the method ever brings them above refrigerator temperature. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it dormant until the ice cream is eaten. Shell eggs in 1877 were assumed safe raw in a way no food authority accepts now.
- "New milk" and unpasteurised creamNew milk meant fresh, unpasteurised milk. Combined with an uncooked base, that compounds the raw-egg risk. Modern cream and milk are pasteurised, but the recipe's structure still leaves the eggs uncooked.
- A long time at unsafe temperatureNo kill step -- "Put in freezer till thoroughly chilled through" refers to the pail of an ice-and-salt hand churn, not a modern appliance. Chilling and freezing hold bacteria dormant; there is no step anywhere that reduces bacterial load.
- What to do insteadIf you want an egg-enriched ice cream, use a current recipe with a cooked custard base taken to a measured temperature, or one built on pasteurised egg product. Do not attempt to patch this one.
- Reading the quantitiesFor historical interest: three pints cream, one quart milk and one pint powdered sugar make about three quarts of mixture before churning, a batch sized for a household crank freezer of the period. Powdered sugar here means finely ground sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of Ohio Methodist church circles, and its ice-cream chapter belongs to the period when the hand-cranked freezer was becoming affordable for ordinary households. Recipes of this type — cream, milk, sugar, flavouring, no cooked custard — are generally called Philadelphia-style, in contrast to the egg-thickened French style; beaten whites, as here, lighten the body without the trouble of cooking a custard. The signed attribution is characteristic of the book, which was assembled from solicited contributions and prints donors' names and cities with many of its receipts, so that a New York cook's ice cream sits alongside an Ohio farmwife's bread.