Home › Frozen Desserts › Frozen Custard
Frozen Custard
1 quart milk 4 eggs 1 cup sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla Bring the milk to a boil; pour it slowly on the yolks of the eggs well beaten with the sugar; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth and boil until a thick custard is formed. When the steam has passed off, add the flavoring; cool and freeze.
A plain boiled custard turned into ice cream, from the era when "freeze" meant a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. The instructions are terse but complete; the only real trap is the word "boil."
- Do not actually boil itAn egg custard curdles somewhere around 185F. Cook over low heat or a double boiler, stirring, until it coats the spoon and reads 175-180F, then pull it off. "Boil" is often used loosely in recipes of this period for cooking over water, though how this writer meant it cannot be known; taken literally here it gives you scrambled sweet milk.
- Strain before chillingEven a careful custard leaves threads of set egg. Pour it through a fine sieve into a cold bowl, which also stops the cooking.
- The beaten whitesThis is a whole-egg base rather than the yolk-only French style. Because the whites are added and then cooked, most of the air beaten into them collapses, so the effect on the finished texture is modest.
- "When the steam has passed off"Vanilla extract is alcohol-based and some of its aroma is lost in hot liquid. Wait until the custard has cooled to merely warm, as the recipe directs, before adding it.
- Chill fully firstCool and refrigerate the base at least four hours, ideally overnight. A base going into the machine at 40F or below churns faster and freezes with smaller ice crystals.
- FreezingIn an ice-cream maker, churn 20-30 minutes, then harden in the freezer an hour or two. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it smooth with a whisk or food processor two or three times during the first few hours, or it will set solid and grainy.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. The mixture is low in fat by modern standards, so it freezes hard; let it sit out ten minutes before scooping.
Frozen custard in this sense is simply boiled custard put through an ice-cream freezer, and it stood as an alternative to a cream-rich Philadelphia-style ice cream: a quart of milk and four eggs cost less than a quart of heavy cream and produced a smoother result than milk alone. Hand-crank freezers, widely available from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, made this a dessert any household with access to ice could manage, and loose-leaf and community cookbooks of the period devote whole sections to frozen desserts. The name later attached itself in the United States to the dense, soft-served, egg-enriched product sold from custard stands in the Midwest and along the East Coast, but that commercial usage is a later development; here the words mean exactly what they say.