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French Ice Cream
4 to 6 egg yolks 1 tablespoon vanilla ¼ teaspoon salt Make a soft custard of milk, sugar and yolks of eggs. When cool, add cream whipped, salt and flavoring.
Freeze. 4 cups light cream
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription: the milk and sugar are called for in the method but their quantities have dropped out, and "4 teaspoon salt" is almost certainly a quarter teaspoon. What survives is a standard frozen custard formula, and the proportions can be reasoned back from it.
- The missing quantitiesThe method requires milk and sugar, but no amounts appear on the page. A period custard base of this type runs about 2 cups milk and 1 cup sugar to 4 to 6 yolks; treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- Salt"4 teaspoon salt" is a broken fraction. A quarter teaspoon is the sensible reading for this volume of dairy; a full four teaspoons would be inedible.
- Soft custard, and where to stopThis is the hinge. Cook the milk, sugar and yolks over low heat or a water bath only until it coats a spoon, around 170-180F. Past that the yolks curdle and no amount of straining recovers the texture. Strain it anyway before chilling.
- Chill properly, not just "cool""When cool" means cold. Refrigerate the custard several hours or overnight before adding the cream; a lukewarm base melts the whipped cream and freezes coarse.
- Light creamLight cream today starts at about 18 percent fat and in practice will not whip. Use heavy or whipping cream if you want the whipped volume the recipe describes, and fold it in rather than stirring. What the book meant by "light cream" in 1907 is not fixed, since cream was not standardised then.
- Freezing"Freeze" meant a hand-crank churn packed with ice and coarse salt in about three parts ice to one part salt. In a modern machine, churn 20-30 minutes, then ripen in the freezer an hour or two to firm up.
- YieldWith 4 cups of cream plus a custard base of the size reconstructed above, expect somewhere around 2 quarts, serving 10 to 12. The figure moves with whatever milk and sugar quantities you settle on.
"French ice cream" in American cookbooks of this period generally meant a cooked egg-yolk custard base, as opposed to the "Philadelphia" style of sweetened cream and flavoring frozen with no eggs at all, though period usage was not perfectly consistent. The distinction was standard vocabulary in turn-of-the-century books and lingers today in the term "French vanilla," which still signals a yellow, custard-rich ice cream rather than a particular variety of bean. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its promotional chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire, so a plain vanilla custard base earns its place here as the foundation the chocolate and fruit variations build on. Freezing anything at home in 1907 meant ice delivered by wagon, rock salt, and a good deal of cranking; frozen dishes occupied their own chapter and were treated as company food.</p>