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New York Ice Cream
Two cups milk, 3 cups cream, 1 cup sugar, 1 pinch salt, yolks of 4 eggs, 1 tablespoon gelatine, 1 tablespoon vanilla or lemon extract. Make a custard of milk, sugar, eggs and salt. Bring it to a boil. Remove from fire and add gelatine, melted in a little warm water, cool, strain and flavor. Whip the cream, add it to custard and freeze after it has become cold.
A rich custard base stiffened with gelatine, written for a hand-crank freezer. Two instructions need rethinking: the boil, and the amount of gelatine.
- Do not actually boil itEgg yolks curdle well below boiling. Cook the milk, sugar, salt and yolks over low heat or in a double boiler until the custard coats a spoon, about 170-180F, then pull it off.
- The gelatineA tablespoon of granulated gelatine is roughly a packet and a third by modern measure, which will give a noticeably chewy, slow-melting ice cream. Two teaspoons is closer to what most readers will want as a stabiliser. Bloom it in a little cold water first, then dissolve it in the hot custard rather than in "warm water," which may not fully melt it.
- Chill thoroughly"Freeze after it has become cold" means fully cold, not merely cool. Refrigerate the base at least four hours, preferably overnight, or the gelatine will not set evenly and the churn will take too long.
- Whipped creamWhip to soft peaks only and fold it in. Most of that air is lost in the churn anyway; the point is the fat, not the volume. If you are using a modern machine you can simply stir in cold unwhipped cream with no real loss.
- Freezing equipmentThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked twenty to thirty minutes. Any modern churn works; expect 20-30 minutes to soft-serve texture, then a few hours in the freezer to firm.
- Extract quantityA tablespoon of vanilla is generous but not wrong for this volume of dairy. Start with two teaspoons and taste the cold base before churning, since cold mutes flavour.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts, serving eight to ten.
"New York ice cream" was, in the American cookbook vocabulary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a shorthand for the egg-custard style, as against "Philadelphia ice cream," which was simply cream, sugar and flavouring with no eggs at all. The distinction, though the New York label itself appears only occasionally in period manuals, roughly maps onto what is now called French-style versus Philadelphia-style. The gelatine is the tell of the era: before commercial stabilisers, home cooks turned to gelatine, cornstarch or arrowroot to keep hand-churned ice cream from turning coarse and icy in an icebox that offered no real hardening temperature.