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Medium Ice Cream
One quart cream, 1½ quarts sweet milk, 3 cups sugar, 4 eggs, 1 tablespoon of vanilla or lemon. Stir together; freeze.
This is a raw uncooked ice cream base: the eggs go into cold cream and milk and are never heated at any stage. That is the reason it cannot be recommended as written, and it also affects how the rest of the instructions should be read.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe four eggs are stirred into cold dairy and taken straight to the freezer, so nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them, and the mixture is eaten cold, so there is no later step that corrects the problem. Use a current cooked-custard or pasteurized-egg recipe instead.
- Long unrefrigerated churningHand-cranked freezing of this volume would have taken a considerable while, during which a rich egg-and-dairy mixture sat at ice-bucket temperatures and warmer at the edges. In households that kept a cow or bought locally, cream might be used very soon after milking; that assumption does not carry over to a modern kitchen.
- "1/2 quarts sweet milk" is ambiguousAs printed this could be half a quart or one and a half quarts, and the surrounding proportions do not settle it. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk rather than sour or buttermilk.
- "Freeze" means a churn, not a freezer compartmentThe original assumes a crank freezer: an inner canister surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, turned steadily so the mixture is agitated as it sets. Poured into a modern freezer tray unagitated, the same mixture would set into a coarse sweet ice block.
- Sweetness by period standardThree cups of sugar to somewhere between one and a half and two and a half quarts of liquid, depending on how the milk is read, is markedly sweeter than most present-day ice creams. 'Medium' in such recipes usually grades the richness of the base rather than the sugar level. Sugar also lowers the freezing point.
- YieldDepending on how the milk quantity is read, this would fill roughly a two- to four-quart canister, enough for a dozen or more dessert portions. Recipes of this size were written for company rather than for a household of four.
Recipes graded as "rich," "medium" and "cheap" or "plain" ice cream are common in American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the grade generally refers to the ratio of cream to milk rather than to flavor or technique. The category spread as the hand-crank freezer, patented in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and inexpensive by the 1890s, put ice cream within reach of ordinary kitchens, while commercial ice delivery made cracked ice easier to obtain in town. Uncooked bases like this one appear in that literature alongside boiled custards, at a period when general milk pasteurization was not yet standard. The choice of "vanilla or lemon" reflects the two extracts most likely to be on a household shelf, vanilla having become the common American flavoring by this period.