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Economical Ice Cream
1_quart milk 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2 level tablespoons flour 1 saltspoon salt 2 teaspoons vanilla Make a boiled custard, following the usual directions, and freeze. If desired, fresh fruits, thoroughly mashed and sweetened, may be added instead of vanilla.
A wartime-thrifty custard ice cream: milk instead of cream, flour instead of extra eggs. It will freeze harder and icier than a modern custard base, which is worth knowing before you start.
- SaltspoonRoughly a quarter teaspoon. In a milk-heavy base the pinch of salt is worth keeping.
- "The usual directions" for boiled custardThe page does not give them. Broadly: mix the flour and sugar into the beaten eggs, temper with the hot milk, then cook over low heat or in a double boiler, stirring, until it coats a spoon. A flour-thickened custard is more forgiving of heat than a pure egg one, because the starch protects the eggs, and it needs a little cooking to lose the raw flour taste.
- Why the flour is thereWith no cream in the mix, the starch helps hold water so the ice crystals stay smaller, partly compensating for the missing fat. Leave it out and you get something closer to a milk ice.
- Chill before freezingThe instruction to "freeze" assumes a salt-and-ice churn. Cool the custard completely, ideally overnight in the refrigerator, or the machine will spend its whole run just dropping the temperature and the texture will suffer.
- Ice and salt proportionsFor a hand-crank freezer, pack roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt around the can. A modern electric churn takes about 20-30 minutes on a fully chilled base.
- Adding fruitMash and sweeten the fruit, then fold it into the cold custard, never the hot — acidic fruit such as strawberry or peach will curdle warm egg custard. Strain out excess juice or the extra water freezes into hard shards.
- Yield and servingAbout one and a half quarts, serving six to eight. Low-fat bases set rock hard in a home freezer; eat it within a day and let it stand ten minutes before scooping.
"Economical" is doing real work in this title. Ice cream in the American household books of this era divides sharply between Philadelphia-style creams -- heavy cream, sugar, flavouring, nothing else -- and cheaper custard or "boiled" bases stretched with milk, eggs and a thickener. The flour-and-milk version belongs to the second tradition, and it belongs to a period when cream was dear and home freezing meant a wooden bucket, a can, and a sack of rock salt. The instruction to substitute mashed fresh fruit "instead of vanilla" reflects how such books were used: one base recipe, repeated through a season as the strawberries, then the peaches, then the plums came in.