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Frozen Custard
To one quart of heated milk add three well-beaten eggs, one cup of sugar, and a pinch of salt. Cool, add the fruit or juice desired, and freeze. With custard, also, it is sometimes best to partially freeze before adding to it the fruit juice.
A plain French-style ice cream base, written for a hand-crank freezer and assuming the cook already knows how a boiled custard behaves. Two things need spelling out: the base wants real cooking, and fruit acid is why the recipe tells you to freeze first and flavour second.
- Cook the base, don't just heat it"Heated milk" is doing a lot of work here. Temper the beaten eggs with some of the hot milk, return everything to the pan, and stir over low heat until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F. Three eggs to a quart is a light custard, so it will never thicken much; go by temperature, not by body.
- Chill hard before churning"Cool" means refrigerator-cold, ideally several hours or overnight. A base going into the machine above about 40F churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- Why the fruit goes in lateAcidic juice — lemon, orange, strawberry, pineapple — poured into a warm or unfrozen egg custard can curdle it into grainy flecks. The original allows that it is "sometimes best" to freeze partway first, so that the juice is churned through a mixture already cold and set.
- How much fruitThe original gives no quantity. For a quart of milk, 1 to 1 1/2 cups of purée or juice is a reasonable starting point; much more and the custard tastes watery and freezes icy rather than creamy.
- Sugar and freezing pointOne cup of sugar to a quart of milk is already a sweet base. If you add sweetened fruit or a sweet purée on top of that, the extra sugar depresses the freezing point and the result will stay slushy. Sweeten the fruit only if it is genuinely sour.
- The freezer"Freeze" here almost certainly means a churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt, cranked until stiff, then packed to ripen. A domestic ice cream machine does the same job in 20-30 minutes; a still-frozen pan will need beating two or three times as it sets.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 quarts once the fruit is in, serving six to eight. Eat it within a day or two — there are no stabilisers or gums here, and it turns hard and crystalline in a home freezer.
Frozen custard in this sense is not the dense machine-drawn stuff sold at American roadside stands, which are generally traced to Coney Island around 1919, but the older kitchen distinction between a plain cream mixture and one enriched with eggs — what is usually called French-style ice cream, as against the eggless "Philadelphia" style. Cookery books often open a frozen-desserts chapter with two or three base recipes, a plain cream, a custard, and a water ice, on the understanding that everything after them is a variation made by stirring in whatever fruit is in season. A formula of this kind is one to be memorised, not a dish in itself: it belongs to the era of the hand-cranked, ice-and-salt freezer, when ice was a delivered commodity and a quart of custard meant twenty minutes of someone's arm.