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Ice Cream and Frozen Custard
After having tried many new and patent freezers, some of the best housekeepers have come to the conclusion that the old-fashioned freezer is the best. It is well, however, to keep a patent freezer on hand, in case of your wanting ice cream on short notice; but for common use an old-fashioned one is the best, especially as servants are so apt to get a patent freezer out or order. The great secret of freezing cream quickly in a common freezer is to have the cream and salt in readiness before breaking the ice into small pieces the size of a walnut. There must be a space of two inches between the freezer and the tub in which it is set. Put a little ice and salt under the bottom of the freezer, then pack alternate layers of ice and salt several inches higher than the cream is in the freezer. If there is no top to the tub, with an aperture to admit the freezer, pin a woolen cloth over it and turn the freezer rapidly. When the cream begins to harden on the sides of the freezer, cut it down with a knife, scrape from the sides, and beat with a large iron spoon. Then cover again, and turn rapidly till it is as hard as mush. When the ice begins to melt, drain off the salt and water, adding more salt and ice, which must be kept above the level of the cream in the freezer. When done, tie large news-papers over the tub and freezer. Put a woollen cloth or blanket over these, and set the cream in a dark, cool closet till wanted. In this way it may be kept for hours in summer, and for days in winter, and will grow harder instead of melting. As cream can be kept thus, it is well to make it early in the day and set it aside, leaving more leisure for other preparations that are better made immediately before dinner.
Ice cream making, like other branches of housekeeping, is much facilitated by having all the ingredients at hand before beginning on it. As such explicit directions for the process are given in the subsequent pages, it is unnecessary for me to add anything further on the subject. Unless you have pure cream to freeze, it is better to make plain boiled custard rather than to attempt an imitation of ice cream.
It is a good plan to make jelly and custard at the same time, so that the yolks of eggs not used in the jelly may be utilized in custard either boiled or baked. The same proportions are generally used for boiled and baked custard. Instead of flavoring with extract of vanilla, it is much better to boil a vanilla bean in the milk, or to boil some peach leaves tied up in a piece of muslin (six or eight leaves to a quart of milk), or to flavor it with burnt sugar. Never flavor custard with extract of lemon, when you can obtain fresh lemons for the purpose.
When you have no yolks left from making jelly, boil a quart of milk (flavored by the above directions). Have ready three eggs, whites and yolks beaten together to a stiff froth, and into these stir a teacup of powdered white sugar. Dip up the boiling milk, pour slowly on the eggs, stirring rapidly. When all the milk has been stirred in the eggs, wash out the kettle, put the milk and eggs back into it, and let the mixture boil till it begins to thicken, when it must be taken immediately from the fire, poured into a bowl, and stirred till cold and smooth.
Many persons, before freezing, stir in the frothed whites of three eggs. The same directions given for freezing cream apply to the freezing of custard. Boiled custard should never be used as a substitute for cream in making fruit ice creams, nor should it ever be eaten with jelly.
Two things are being taught here: how to freeze in a salt-and-ice tub, and how to make the boiled custard that goes into it. The custard is where the recipe fails most often.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boil"Let the mixture boil till it begins to thicken" is the one direction to disregard. A milk-and-egg custard sets at about 175-180F; at a true boil the eggs scramble and the mixture breaks. Cook it over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon, then pull it off and strain it into a cold bowl.
- The frothed raw whitesThe optional step of stirring three beaten raw whites into the finished custard just before freezing leaves those whites uncooked, and freezing does not make egg safe. Modern practice is simply to leave them out; the custard freezes perfectly well without them.
- Peach leavesPeach leaves carry cyanogenic compounds, the same family that gives bitter almonds their flavor and their reputation. The infusion appears in many nineteenth-century American cookbooks, but there is no reason to use it now. A split vanilla bean steeped in the hot milk gives what the author was after.
- "Patent" versus "old-fashioned" freezerThe patent freezer of the period was generally a crank machine with a dasher that scrapes and churns for you; the old-fashioned one is a plain metal canister turned by hand in a tub, its contents scraped down with a knife and beaten with a spoon. An electric ice cream maker replaces both, and a food-processor churn on a shallow frozen tray replaces neither well but works.
- Salt and ice proportionsThe recipe never gives a ratio. Coarse rock salt at roughly one part salt to six or eight parts ice by volume is the usual guidance for a hand-turned canister. The recipe's ice "the size of a walnut" means broken small rather than left in large lumps; big pieces leave air gaps and the freezing stalls.
- "As hard as mush"That is the correct stopping point for churning, roughly soft-serve. The newspaper-and-blanket wrapping that follows is ripening: several hours in a cold, insulated place to firm the texture. A covered container in the back of a modern freezer does the same job in about four hours.
- MeasuresA teacup of powdered sugar is about three-quarters of a cup, and "powdered" here means finely milled granulated, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Three eggs to a quart of milk is a lean custard by current standards; modern custard bases commonly use six to eight yolks per quart.
- Burnt sugarFlavoring with burnt sugar means caramelizing sugar dry until dark and bitter, then dissolving it in a little water and stirring it into the milk. It is a distinct flavor, not a sweetener, and a little goes a long way in a quart.
- YieldA quart of milk, three eggs and sugar gives about a quart and a half of frozen custard once churned, serving six.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, and this passage has the tone of a woman settling an argument among them: the geared patent freezer is convenient but the servants break it, so keep the plain canister. Ice cream at home depended entirely on the ice trade, which cut lake and river ice in the North and shipped it south to be stored in icehouses through the summer; that is why the author is so concerned with insulation, drainage and getting the work done early in the day. Hand-cranked freezers of the sort she calls "patent" are generally traced to Nancy Johnson, credited with the dasher-and-canister design in the 1840s, after which the machine spread quickly through American households. Her closing rule about boiled custard belongs to the same practical economy as the rest of the book: jelly took the whites, custard took the yolks, and nothing in a well-run kitchen was thrown away.