Ice Cream
Dissolve five teaspoonfuls Oswego starch or arrow-root in a teacup milk. Add to it the whites of three eggs well frothed, and the yolk of one, well beaten. Sweeten with loaf sugar and boil half a gallon new milk. As soon as it begins to boil, pour it in small quantities over the mixture of eggs and starch, till about half the milk is taken out of the kettle. Then pour all back in the kettle and stir a few moments. After it cools, add one quart rich cream; season to the taste and freeze.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Ice Cream.
One quart milk, two eggs, one teaspoonful corn starch, one teaspoonful arrow-root. A small lump of butter.--Mrs. E. B.
Ice Cream.
Cream one tablespoonful butter from which the salt has been washed. Add three tablespoonfuls corn starch. Dissolve this in half a gallon new milk, heated, sweetened and seasoned. Beat the whites of four eggs, and stir in just before freezing.--Mrs. McG.
Three contributed formulas for a starch-thickened ice cream, printed one after another. The first two build a cooked custard base; the third folds raw beaten egg whites into the base immediately before freezing, and that is the version that cannot be recommended today.
- Why the cautionIn Mrs. McG.'s version the whites of four eggs are beaten and stirred in "just before freezing," so they never reach any temperature at all. Freezing does not destroy Salmonella; it preserves it, and the finished cream is eaten cold. Use a current cooked-custard ice cream recipe, or pasteurized whites, rather than this method.
- Mrs. E. B.'s entryIt is an ingredient list with no method, no sugar and no cream, and cannot be followed as printed. Read it as a note on proportions rather than a recipe.
- Oswego starchA brand name for cornstarch, milled at Oswego, New York, and widely enough sold that period recipes often use the name loosely for cornstarch generally. Substitute plain cornstarch measure for measure. The arrowroot called for as an alternative sets more softly and clouds less.
- Loaf sugar and new milkLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone; granulated white sugar is the equivalent. "New milk" means fresh whole milk, not skimmed, and in 1878 it was unpasteurized and unstandardized, so somewhat richer than a modern carton.
- Tempering, the hinge of the first versionHalf a gallon of boiling milk poured all at once onto three whites and a yolk will scramble them. Adding it "in small quantities" and returning the whole to the pan for only a few moments is the point of the instruction; the starch is what actually thickens the mixture, so it does not need to be cooked to a coating custard.
- QuantityHalf a gallon of milk plus a quart of cream gives roughly three quarts of base, beyond the capacity of most domestic ice cream machines today. Scale the first recipe to a quarter or a third if you are working from it.
- "Season to the taste"The book gives no flavouring here. Vanilla, grated nutmeg, lemon rind and rosewater were all in use at the period; if using vanilla, start small and taste.
- Washing the butterMrs. McG. has you rinse the salt from the butter, which was necessary when butter was farm-made and heavily salted for keeping. Unsalted butter needs no such treatment.
- Freezing"Freeze" here means a hand-cranked churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, turned steadily for twenty to thirty minutes. The base should be thoroughly cold before it goes in.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, works by gathering signed contributions from named housewives, which is why the same dish appears three times over with three different sets of proportions and no attempt to reconcile them. All three are starch ice creams rather than true custards: cornstarch or arrowroot does the thickening that egg yolks and cream would otherwise have done, with a quart of cream added at the end for richness in the most lavish of the three. Hand-cranked freezers with a paddle scraping the inside of a salt-packed cylinder had been in domestic use for a generation by then, moving ice cream from a confectioner's luxury to something a well-equipped Southern household made at home in summer, provided it had an icehouse or a supplier.