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Frozen Custard
One quart of milk, four eggs, one cup of sugar, two teaspoons of Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract, or other flavors, if preferred; two tablespoons Larkin Corn Starch. Prepare as for any custard, scalding the milk, and adding to it the Corn Starch moistened in a small portion of the milk. Beat the eggs separately, adding the sugar to the yolks, and then the beaten whites. The Corn Starch should be cooked below boiling point; then the eggs and sugar added. Cook mixture two minutes. Take from the fire; add the Orange Extract. Let cool and when thoroughly chilled, freeze, using three parts of ice, chopped very fine, to one part of salt. When frozen, remove the dasher, pack with more ice and salt, and allow to ripen two hours before serving.
A straightforward cooked custard base for a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. The only real difficulty is getting the eggs set without scrambling them, and translating the ice-and-salt instructions to whatever machine you own.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmer"Cooked below boiling point" is the whole instruction. Hold the custard between 170F and 180F and stir constantly; above about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining fully recovers the texture. Strain through a fine sieve as insurance before chilling.
- Two minutes is short for a reasonThe cornstarch does most of the thickening, so the eggs need only enough time to set and pasteurize. If the mixture coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn with a fingertip, it is done.
- Larkin extract and cornstarchLarkin was a Buffalo mail-order house whose cookbooks doubled as catalogues for its own groceries. Any orange extract and any cornstarch will do; two teaspoons of extract is assertive, so start with one and taste the cooled base.
- Beaten whitesFolding in whipped whites lightens the base but they largely collapse during churning. Skipping the separation and whisking the whole eggs with the sugar gives a nearly identical result with less work.
- Three parts ice to one of saltPresumably by measure rather than weight, and with coarse salt, in an old-style bucket freezer with a dasher; the recipe does not say. The brine wants to come well up the canister. Household ice-cream machines with a frozen bowl or a compressor need no salt at all; churn 20 to 25 minutes.
- Chill thoroughly firstThe base must be refrigerator-cold, ideally overnight, before it goes into the freezer. A warm base churns slowly and gives coarse ice crystals.
- RipeningTwo hours packed in ice and salt lets the texture firm and the flavor settle. In a modern freezer, transfer to a covered container, press parchment on the surface, and hold two to four hours; kept much longer than a day it tends to turn icy.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of base, depending on how much air the churning works in.
"Frozen custard" in this period simply meant an egg-thickened ice cream, distinct from the plain cream-and-sugar "Philadelphia" style; the American frozen-custard trade, with its high-overrun machines and boardwalk stands, came later, and is conventionally dated to Coney Island around 1919. The recipe belongs to a genre of cookbook that was also advertising: Larkin, a soap manufacturer that expanded into groceries and household goods sold by mail, issued booklets in which its own extracts and cornstarch were named in the ingredient lists. The cornstarch itself is telling. A pure custard of four eggs to a quart of milk is thin, and cornstarch was the economical way to build body without cream. The ice-and-salt packing assumes a wooden bucket freezer with a hand crank, a piece of equipment often said to have been common in kitchens by the end of the century.