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Fig Ice-Cream
For two quarts of fig ice-cream mix one quart of cream with two cups of sugar and freeze partially. Then add to the mixture two cups of fig marmalade, the juice of one lemon with one teaspoonful of lemon extract, and the whites of four eggs with which has been whipped a pinch of salt, and finish freezing.
Stir together one pint of cream, one pint of new milk, and three-fourths cup of sugar. Place on stove and bring to a boil. In a separate vessel should have been stewed one cup of chopped dried figs or two cups of fresh fruit in one-half cup of water. Add to the hot milk and let cool. Then freeze, adding at the last moment either pineapple or lemon extract and the juice of half a lemon. This will make nearly two quarts.
Two formulas are run together in one paragraph: a rich uncooked cream base folded with fig marmalade and raw egg whites, and a second, cooked custard-style base of scalded milk and cream with stewed figs. Only the first carries the safety problem.
- Why the cautionThe first formula folds the whites of four raw eggs into a mixture that is never heated at any stage — the cream is churned cold, the marmalade is cold, and the whole thing goes straight into the freezer. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and the product is then eaten over days or weeks. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- The second formula is a different animalThe version beginning "Stir together one pint of cream, one pint of new milk" contains no egg at all and brings the dairy to a boil before the fruit goes in. Cooked bases of this kind were one of the standard approaches of the period.
- "New milk"Fresh, whole, unskimmed milk straight from that day's supply. Modern whole milk is the nearest equivalent.
- "Freeze partially"In a crank freezer this means churning until the mixture is thick and slushy but still soft enough to stir additions through, roughly the soft-serve stage. Additions made later stay in ribbons rather than dissolving.
- Fig marmaladeNot citrus marmalade. In this period the word covers any fruit boiled thick with sugar to a spreadable mass — here, a plain fig preserve. Commercial fig jam is the nearest substitute, and it is usually sweeter than a homemade one, so the two cups of sugar in the base are generous.
- Stewed dried figsOne cup of chopped dried figs in half a cup of water needs long enough to soften completely and swell — dried Mission or Calimyrna figs will drink far more than half a cup if given time, so watch the pan. The skins stay tough; chopping fine or pressing the stewed fruit through a sieve gives a smoother frozen texture.
- Lemon extract and pineapple extractBoth were common bottled flavourings of the period. A teaspoon of lemon extract is assertive by modern standards; the finely grated zest of a lemon gives a similar lift with less of the alcohol note.
- Machine capacityEach formula makes close to two quarts, which is more than most domestic ice-cream machines will hold once churning air is factored in. Halve the quantities or work in two batches.
Figs reached American kitchens mainly in dried form for most of the nineteenth century, shipped from Smyrna in pressed layers and sold by the box; the fresh fruit was a regional luxury, since a ripe fig travels badly and spoils within a day or two. Cookbooks of the period therefore treat dried figs as the default and fresh ones as the alternative, which is the phrasing here — "one cup of chopped dried figs or two cups of fresh fruit." Commercial fig growing in California is generally traced to the Mission trees planted at the Spanish missions, with Smyrna-type plantings following in the later nineteenth century. The ice-cream itself belongs to the era of the hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, a piece of equipment common enough in middle-class households by then that a writer could say "freeze partially" and expect to be understood without further explanation.