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Fig Ice Cream
3 cups milk 1 cup sugar Yolks 5 eggs 1 teaspoon salt 1 lb. Figs, finely chopped 1 1/2 cups heavy cream Whites 5 eggs 1 tablespoon vanilla 2 tablespoon brandy Make custard of yolks of eggs, sugar, and milk; strain, add figs, cool, and flavor. Add whites of eggs beaten until stiff and heavy cream beaten until stiff; freeze and mould.
A rich frozen custard from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, but one built around uncooked egg white that is folded in after the custard has cooled and then never heated again.
- Why this one failsThe five egg whites go in raw, whipped stiff, and the mixture goes straight to the freezer. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it. Nothing in the method brings the whites to a safe temperature, and the sugar and alcohol present are far too dilute to matter. Use a current ice cream recipe instead.
- The cooked halfOnly the yolks are heated, in the milk-and-sugar custard. A cook would judge that custard by eye, taking it off when it coated the spoon, so the yolk portion's final temperature is not controlled by the method as written.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt in a mixture of this size is well outside modern proportion, and modern recipes of this type generally use far less. It is possible a fraction has gone missing from the line.
- "Freeze and mould"This assumes a churn freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, after which the semi-frozen mixture was packed into a lidded metal mould and buried in more ice and salt to ripen. "Mould" here is that packing step, not a baking dish.
- FigsA pound of figs chopped fine most likely means dried figs. Dried fig pieces freeze hard and chewy, and some recipes stew or soak them first.
Frozen custards enriched with beaten egg white belong to a family of nineteenth-century ices sometimes called mousse, in which whipped white and whipped cream were folded in to lighten a mixture that would otherwise freeze dense in a hand-cranked churn. Dried figs were a cheap, storable pantry staple in American kitchens of the period, arriving in pressed blocks or strings from Smyrna and later from California, and they turn up in puddings, cakes and ices as a way of getting concentrated sweetness and body without fresh fruit. The brandy has a practical role beyond flavor: alcohol lowers the freezing point, keeping a churned mixture softer and easier to mould.