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Plain Ice Cream
3 eggs 1 tablespoon vanilla teaspoon salt Prepare as for Soft Custard.
This is the simplest and cheapest ice cream made. One pint of cream added is an improvement.
Freeze according to directions for freezing. See colored illustration, Plate XX, opposite.
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: the ingredient line has been clipped in transcription, and the method lives under Soft Custard elsewhere in the book. Read it as a custard-base ice cream and fill in the standard proportions from that recipe.
- The missing ingredientsThree eggs, vanilla and salt cannot make ice cream on their own; the milk and sugar have dropped out of the transcription, and the method lives under Soft Custard elsewhere in the book. The quantities here are genuinely incomplete as printed; do not guess them from this page alone.
- "Teaspoon salt"Almost certainly a fraction that dropped out in printing; period custards call for anything from a few grains to half a teaspoon. A full teaspoon would be aggressively salty by the standards of the period, though it would not be dangerous.
- A tablespoon of vanillaProbably not a misprint: large measures of extract are common in period ice creams, and freezing mutes flavour considerably. With modern commercial extract, two teaspoons is likely closer to the intended effect.
- The custard is the hingeCook it to about 170-175F, until it coats a spoon, and no further. Boiled custard curdles and the resulting ice cream is grainy no matter how well it is churned. Strain it and chill it thoroughly — ideally overnight — before it goes into the freezer.
- "One pint of cream added is an improvement"It is more than that. Butterfat is what keeps ice crystals small; a milk-only custard freezes hard and icy. Stir the cold cream into the chilled custard just before churning.
- Freezing without a freezerThe original directions mean a hand-crank bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. Any modern churn works; the mixture should be at refrigerator temperature going in, and the finished ice cream wants two to three hours in the freezer to ripen.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, as one of the elaborate promotional cookbooks that food companies produced in the early twentieth century — hence the colour plates the text keeps referring to. "Plain" here distinguishes a cooked custard base from the philadelphia-style creams, which are built on an uncooked cream base, as well as from the fruit ices and the many chocolate frozen dishes that made up the rest of the section and the reason for the book's existence. Cooked-custard ice cream of this kind is often said to have been a common American home preparation once the hand-crank freezer with its ice-and-salt bucket became a widespread household possession in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the author's note that this is "the simplest and cheapest ice cream made" reflects a period when cream was the expensive part and eggs and milk were the economy.