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Hazel Nut Ice Cream
Beat two eggs with one cup of sugar, add two cups of heavy cream, a cup and a half of milk, and three quarters of a cup of hazel nuts chopped fine.
Freeze.
A four-line uncooked ice cream base of the kind that was standard before home refrigeration and before anyone worried about what was in the eggs. The problem is the eggs, and it is not a small one.
- Raw eggs, never heatedThe two eggs are beaten in raw and the mixture goes straight into the freezer. Nothing in the method brings the base to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the cream and milk are an excellent growth medium during the time the mixture sits before and during churning.
- Freezing is not a kill stepFreezing halts bacterial multiplication but does not destroy the organisms. A contaminated base is still contaminated when it comes out of the churn, and stays that way through storage and serving.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg desserts are singled out in current food-safety guidance for children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — which is much of the audience for a dish of ice cream at a party.
- If you want hazelnut ice creamUse a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurised eggs. We are not going to supply times and temperatures here, because doing so would imply this particular set of proportions has been tested and it has not.
- "Freeze" meant a churnThe single word most likely assumes a crank or electric freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Poured into a tray and left still, this mixture would set hard and icy rather than into churned ice cream.
- Hazel nuts and filbertsThe two names were used interchangeably in American cookbooks of the period. The recipe gives no instruction to toast or skin them; the bitter papery skins are usually removed today by roasting and rubbing the nuts in a towel.
- YieldThree and a half cups of dairy plus sugar, eggs and nuts makes something over a quart of base before churning, so roughly a quart and a half finished.
Uncooked ice cream bases were common in American practice alongside cooked custard ones. What Philadelphia cookery called plain ice cream was simply cream, sugar and flavouring frozen without eggs at all, and the egg-enriched version here sits between that and the cooked French custard. The hazelnut is a less usual choice than vanilla, strawberry and peach, which dominate the ice cream chapters of the period, and nut ices more often meant almond, pistachio or black walnut. The casual instruction to beat raw eggs into cream that will never see heat is a fair marker of how differently the risk was understood before mid-century egg-handling guidance.