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Vanilla Custard Cream
1 cup sweet milk 3/4 cup granulated sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 2 egg yolks 1/3 cup single cream 2 egg whites pinch of salt 1 1/2 cups XX cream 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.
Mix granulated sugar and cornstarch. Add scalded milk gradually, stirring constantly. Pour in top of double boiler and cook for 25 minutes. Stir well several times during this cooking process. Remove from fire and add well-beaten egg yolks. Cook again for five minutes, stirring constantly. Add single cream, stir well and pour into mixing bowl to cool. If custard is rather lumpy, beat with egg beater or run custard through sieve. When custard is cool, fold in stiffly beaten egg whites to which salt has been added and place in electric refrigerator to chill. Whip cream, add vanilla and fold into custard. Pour into tray. In one hour remove and stir well.
A tray-frozen vanilla ice cream from the era when the electric refrigerator was new and its ice compartment was the only freezer in the house. The cornstarch-thickened base is what keeps it smooth without a churn.
- Sweet milk and single cream"Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk, as opposed to soured or buttermilk. "Single cream" is light or table cream, roughly 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half is the nearest common substitute.
- XX creamIn context (it is whipped) this is a heavy whipping cream, around 36 to 40 percent fat; the precise meaning of the XX notation is uncertain. Use 1 1/2 cups heavy cream and whip it only to soft peaks so it folds in without streaking.
- The 25-minute cookingCornstarch needs far less than 25 minutes over simmering water to thicken and lose its raw-starch taste; the long time may simply be caution. Stop when the base coats a spoon thickly, and stir often so it does not set in lumps against the sides.
- Tempering the yolksAdding beaten yolks straight to the hot starch base is one likely source of the lumps the recipe anticipates. Whisk a ladle of the hot mixture into the yolks first, then return everything to the pan, and you may not need the sieve.
- Raw egg whitesThe whites are folded in uncooked and never reach a safe temperature. Use pasteurized whites in cartons or shell eggs if serving anyone young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- Freezing in a modern freezerThe ice compartment of an early electric refrigerator ran considerably warmer than a modern freezer, which holds around 0F, so the mixture will firm up faster than the recipe expects. Check at 45 minutes, beat it well to break up ice crystals, and repeat once or twice more for the smoothest texture.
- YieldAbout a quart, or six modest servings. Let it stand at room temperature five to ten minutes before scooping, since it freezes harder than commercial ice cream.
Recipes like this one belong to the first decade of household electric refrigeration, when manufacturers and utility companies issued small recipe and menu books to show owners what the new appliance could do beyond keeping milk cold. Frozen desserts were the showpiece, and because the ice-cube tray offered no agitation, the recipes leaned on cornstarch, egg, whipped cream and beaten whites to hold air and block large ice crystals -- with a single mid-freeze stirring standing in for the crank of the old hand freezer. The phrase "electric refrigerator" in the instructions dates the book.