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Frozen Custard
One quart fresh milk, eight eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately. Put the milk on the fire, sweetened to the taste, and let it come to boiling heat; then take it off and add the yolks. Then wash the kettle and put the custard on the fire again, and let it boil till quite thick. Take it off, and when cool enough, add the whites. Flavor with lemon or vanilla, and freeze.-Mrs. C. N.
Frozen Custard.
Twelve eggs, one gallon milk, four lemons, sugar to taste, freeze.--Mrs. Dr. S.
Both versions here rely on egg that is never brought to a safe temperature, and the second is not cooked at all. The notes below explain where each one fails rather than how to rescue it; for frozen custard today, use a current recipe built on a cooked base.
- The whites are never cookedIn the first version the yolks are cooked into the milk, but the beaten whites go in after the custard has cooled and the mixture then goes straight into the freezer. Nothing afterwards heats them. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it merely suspends it, and the thawing mouthful is as risky as the raw one.
- The second version is raw throughoutTwelve eggs, a gallon of milk, four lemons, sugar, freeze. There is no cooking step at all. That is a large quantity of raw egg and raw dairy held at a temperature that favours survival rather than destruction of pathogens, and served cold to whoever is at the table.
- Acid is not a kill stepThe four lemons in Mrs. Dr. S.'s version might look reassuring, as in a lemon posset or a ceviche. Acidity of this order does not reliably destroy Salmonella in egg, and it is diluted across a gallon of milk. Treat the citrus as flavour only.
- Scale makes it worseA gallon of milk with a dozen eggs is a party-sized batch. Home ice-cream churns take time to freeze a volume that large, and the mixture sits in the danger zone while it does.
- Boiling a custard, as writtenThe first version says to let the custard "boil till quite thick." An egg-and-milk custard curdles well below boiling. The recipe also directs that the kettle be washed before the custard goes back on the fire.
- "Freeze" meant the salt-and-ice churnThere is no mechanical freezer behind these recipes. The mixture went into a metal can set in a wooden bucket packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, and was turned by hand until stiff.
Frozen custard in a household book of this period is a marker of ice, not of dairy skill. Cream and eggs were common enough on a farm; what was scarce and expensive was the ice harvested in winter, packed in sawdust in an ice house, and hoarded through the summer. Recipes like these two, contributed by neighbours and initialled rather than named, depended on that store and on the hand-cranked freezer, a design generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century and by the 1870s a standard piece of American kitchen equipment. The brevity of Mrs. Dr. S.'s entry, five ingredients and the bare word "freeze," suggests the technique was assumed knowledge among the book's readers; only the proportions were worth writing down.