Home › Ice-Creams and Frozen Desserts › French Ice-Cream
French Ice-Cream
6 egg-yolks 5 cups medium cream 3/4 cup sugar Vanilla bean Scald the cream with a piece of vanilla bean. Beat the egg-yolks, add the sugar and pour the cream slowly on the mixture, beating constantly. Cook in a double boiler until it thickens, watching it carefully. Cool and freeze.
A straightforward cooked custard base — what a modern kitchen would call crème anglaise — with the whole hinge sitting in the double boiler.
- Watch the custard, not the clockCook only until it coats the back of a spoon, roughly 170–180F on a thermometer. Much past 185F the yolks begin to curdle, and once broken the base is hard to bring back smooth.
- Medium creamAn older grade running about 20–25 percent butterfat, between today's light and heavy cream. Substitute 2 1/2 cups heavy cream and 2 1/2 cups whole milk for a close match; all heavy cream gives a denser, faintly greasy result.
- Vanilla bean"A piece" means roughly half a pod for this quantity. Split it lengthwise, scald it in the cream, and leave it to steep off the heat for fifteen minutes or so before straining — the recipe assumes you know to fish it out.
- TemperingPouring the hot cream slowly onto the beaten yolks is the whole point of the instruction; add it in a thin stream while whisking or you will scramble the eggs before the custard ever reaches the double boiler.
- Strain and chillPass the cooked custard through a fine sieve, then chill it thoroughly — several hours, or overnight. A base churned while still lukewarm freezes coarse and grainy.
- Freezing"Freeze" here means a hand-crank freezer packed with about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. In a modern machine, churn 20–25 minutes, then firm up in the freezer for two hours.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten. The custard can be halved without adjusting the method.
"French" ice-cream, in American cookbooks of this period, meant nothing about France beyond the technique: a base enriched and thickened with egg yolks, as against "Philadelphia" ice-cream, which was simply cream, sugar and flavouring frozen without eggs. The distinction was standard enough that books listed the two side by side and expected readers to choose between them, the custard version being the richer and more forgiving in the freezer since the yolks slow the growth of ice crystals. That vanilla is called for as a bean rather than an extract suggests a household willing to spend on flavouring.