French Ice Cream

This is a mid-nineteenth-century style custard ice cream written for a hand-crank freezer, but as printed the eggs are never cooked, and that is a problem no amount of churning fixes.

• The custard is never cookedThe yolks receive a pint of hot milk and nothing more — no time over heat, no holding period. Tempering with hot milk drops well below the temperature and duration needed to make egg safe, and the diluted mixture cools immediately.
• The whites go in rawFour beaten whites are folded in cold and then frozen. Freezing does not destroy Salmonella; it preserves it, and the finished cream is eaten without any further heating. For a custard ice cream, use a current recipe with a properly cooked base or pasteurized eggs.
• "Freeze" means a churn packed in ice and saltThe instruction to keep stirring is not optional in the original context: a wooden bucket freezer with a rock-salt-and-ice mixture around the can required constant paddling to keep ice crystals fine and the mixture from setting against the walls.
• Powdered sugarIn household books of this period "powdered sugar" generally meant a finely ground sugar rather than the modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. The two behave differently in a beaten meringue.
• UnitsA pint is 2 cups; a cupful is 8 fluid ounces. "Rich cream" is best read as heavy cream, around 36 percent fat by modern standards, though period cream was not standardised.
• YieldTwo cups of milk, one of cream, one of sugar and four eggs gives something close to a quart before churning, so about six modest servings.