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Frozen Desserts: Custard
Frozen Custard. 1 quart milk, 4 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, FROZEN DESSERTS 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch.
Scald the milk. Moisten the cornstarch with a little cold milk, add it to the hot milk, and stir until it begins to thicken. Beat the eggs and sugar together, add to the hot milk, cook one minute, take from the fire, add vanilla, when cold, freeze.
Frozen Coffee Custard. 4 eggs, pint cream, 1 cupful sugar, 1 pint milk, pint strong coffee.
Scald the milk. Beat the eggs and sugar together until light; add them to the hot milk, cook, and instantly take from the fire, add the cream and coffee. When cold, freeze.
Two stirred custards meant for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. The instructions assume the cook already knows how to temper eggs and how long a custard base needs to ripen, so both need filling in.
- Temper the eggs"Beat the eggs and sugar together, add to the hot milk" will curdle if you pour cold eggs into scalded milk all at once. Whisk a cup of the hot milk into the egg-sugar mixture first, then return it to the pan.
- How far to cook itThe "cook one minute" of the first recipe and the "cook, and instantly take from the fire" of the second both mean the same thing: bring it just to nappe, around 170-175F on a thermometer, stirring constantly, and pull it before it boils. The cornstarch in the vanilla version makes it more forgiving; the coffee version has no starch and will scramble quickly.
- The missing fractionsThe coffee custard lists "pint cream" and "pint strong coffee" with the fraction dropped in printing. A half pint (1 cup) of each balances the pint of milk; a full pint of coffee would overwhelm four eggs and thin the base badly. Treat it as ambiguous and start with a cup.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaApparently a proprietary extract of the period; it does not seem to be sold under that name now. Use 1 tablespoon of good vanilla extract, which is not excessive here -- cold mutes aroma, so frozen desserts need noticeably more flavoring than a warm custard would.
- Chill properly, not just "when cold"Strain the cooked custard, cool it over an ice bath, then refrigerate several hours or overnight. A base churned at room temperature or even at 60F will freeze coarse and grainy.
- FreezingIn a modern machine, churn 20-30 minutes and then harden in the freezer for a few hours. If you are using an old-style crank freezer, the working ratio is roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, packed in layers around the canister.
- Texture expectationsWith no cream at all, the vanilla version is a milk ice rather than an ice cream and will freeze hard and somewhat icy; the cornstarch is there precisely to compensate. Replacing a cup of the milk with cream gives a smoother result without changing the method.
- YieldThe vanilla custard makes a generous quart and a half, six to eight servings; the coffee custard yields notably less, closer to a quart if you use a cup each of cream and coffee. Serve within a day or two -- neither has the stabilizers that let commercial ice cream sit.
Frozen custards like these belong to the era when the hand-crank freezer had become ordinary domestic equipment rather than a confectioner's tool; the crank freezer with its inner canister and outer ice-and-salt bucket is generally credited to Nancy Johnson's 1843 patent, and by the early 1900s a household with a reliable supply of ice could turn out ice cream at home. The two versions here mark a familiar split: an egg-and-milk custard thickened with a little cornstarch, cheap and sturdy, versus a richer custard cut with cream and flavored with strong coffee. The named vanilla is a period artifact -- brand names do turn up in household compilations of this kind -- and Mexican vanilla carried a reputation for quality, the vanilla orchid being native to Mexico.