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French Ice Cream
1 cup milk yolks of 4 eggs 1 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 1 quart cream Scald milk and add to beaten yolks of eggs; add sugar, salt, vanilla and cream which has been whipped. Freeze as usual.
This is a Philadelphia-style shortcut to a French custard: the yolks are warmed only by a cup of scalded milk, then slackened with a quart of whipped cream and frozen. The eggs never reach a temperature that would make them safe, and freezing does not correct that.
- The custard is never cookedA true French ice cream base is stirred over gentle heat until it thickens and holds about 170-180F. Here one cup of scalded milk is poured into four yolks and then immediately diluted with a quart of cold whipped cream; the mixture drops well below any pasteurising temperature within seconds and is never returned to the heat.
- Salmonella and eggsRaw or barely warmed yolks can carry Salmonella Enteritidis, which was not recognised as a shell-egg hazard until long after a book of this period was written. Freezing suspends bacterial growth but cannot be relied on to kill the organism, so the risk travels into the finished ice cream and can persist in the freezer.
- Who this reachesIce cream is served in quantity to children, pregnant women, the elderly and the immunocompromised, the four groups least able to tolerate an egg-borne infection. That is the practical reason modern recipes for this style insist on a cooked custard.
- Churning does not helpA spell in a salt-and-ice freezer or a modern machine holds the mix at roughly 20-25F while incorporating air. Cold does not pasteurise, so whatever the eggs brought with them is still there when the ice cream is served.
- Vanilla is not the outlierA tablespoon of extract to five cups of dairy reads as heavy by modern measure, though period recipes vary widely in how much they call for. Either way it is the egg handling, not the flavouring, that puts this recipe out of use.
- If you want this dessertUse a current French vanilla ice cream recipe that cooks the custard to a stated temperature, or pasteurised shell eggs from a source that specifies them as such. We are not supplying a revised method for the text above.
"French" ice cream, in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meant a base enriched with egg yolks, as against "Philadelphia" ice cream, which was cream, sugar and flavouring with no eggs at all. The distinction was well enough established that books listed both under the same flavour, though period writers did not agree on which of the two was the finer. Recipes like this one belong to the era of the hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, when ice cream had moved from a confectioner's luxury to something a household with a strong arm and an ice delivery could manage. The casual instruction to "freeze as usual" assumes a reader who already knew the drill.