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Coffee Ice Cream
3 pints thin cream 1½ cups sugar Yolks of 3 eggs 1 cup strong coffee 1½ tablespoons gelatine Beat the eggs light; mix with the sugar; add one pint of the cream and make a custard. Dissolve the gelatine in the coffee and when cool add to the cream that remains; add the custard when cool; mix well and freeze. Half milk may be used if desired. 1 pint milk 1/4 cup flour 1½ cups sugar
A pre-electric custard ice cream, stabilised with gelatine to keep it smooth in a hand-crank freezer. The transcription ends with three stray measurements ("1 pint milk, 1/4 cup flour, 1 1/2 cups sugar") that belong to the recipe printed alongside it on the leaf; ignore them here.
- Bloom the gelatine properlySprinkle the gelatine over the cup of cold strong coffee and let it stand until it swells before warming it to dissolve. Tipping dry granules into hot coffee gives strings of undissolved gelatine that never disperse and show up as rubbery threads in the frozen cream.
- "Thin cream"This means light or single cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent; 3 pints is 6 cups. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent will give a much richer, denser result than intended, and can churn grainy or buttery if overworked.
- Custard temperatureThree yolks in a pint of cream is a loose custard. Cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring, to 170-175F, when it coats a spoon. It will not thicken much beyond that before the yolks curdle.
- Gelatine quantity1 1/2 tablespoons is about 4 1/2 teaspoons, or roughly two of the modern 1/4-oz envelopes. That is generous by current standards and will give a slightly chewy body; a rounded tablespoon is enough for the same anti-crystal effect.
- Chill before churningThe instruction to add each element "when cool" is doing real work. Refrigerate the finished mixture several hours, ideally overnight, so the gelatine sets lightly and the base goes into the machine cold. A warm base churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- The coffee"Strong coffee" should be considerably stronger than drinking strength, since 1 cup is flavouring 6 cups of dairy plus sugar, and cold mutes coffee flavour. Brew it double-strength or use espresso, and strain it clear.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, which fills most domestic ice cream machines to the brim. Churn in two batches or scale the recipe by two-thirds.
- StorageGelatine-set ice cream firms up hard in a modern freezer at 0F, far colder than the salt-and-ice freezers this was written for. Let it sit out 10 minutes before serving.
Mrs. Fryer's Loose Leaf Cook Book is generally attributed to Jane Eayre Fryer, a Philadelphia author better known for the Mary Frances instructional books for children, and it belongs to a brief vogue for ring-bound and loose-leaf kitchen manuals that let a housekeeper add her own pages and shuffle the printed ones. The gelatine here is the period signature: before mechanical refrigeration, ice cream was frozen in a wooden pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, and the churn's slow, uneven action produced large ice crystals unless something was added to interfere with them. Home books of the 1900s and 1910s recommend gelatine, cornstarch, arrowroot or a flour-thickened base for exactly this reason, and a stray line of flour and milk adjoins the recipe at the end of this leaf. Coffee as an ice cream flavour was well established by then, appearing in American and English confectioners' manuals through the nineteenth century, and one well attested method was to infuse freshly roasted beans directly in the hot cream rather than to add brewed coffee as Fryer does.