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Straight Ice Cream
Two quarts pure cream, 3 cups sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla or lemon extract. Stir together and freeze, allowing plenty of room in freezer for expansion.
This is Philadelphia-style ice cream: cream, sugar, flavoring, no eggs and no cooking. Everything depends on how it is churned.
- "Freezer" means a churnIn this period the freezer was a hand-crank bucket with a metal can set in ice and coarse salt, not a cold cabinet. The instruction to leave room for expansion refers both to the mixture expanding as it freezes and to the air the dasher whips in, which can add a quarter or more to the volume.
- Batch sizeTwo quarts of cream plus three cups of sugar yields roughly three quarts of finished ice cream. Most domestic machines hold 1 to 2 quarts of finished product, so scale to a third or a half and churn in batches.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThree cups of granulated sugar will not dissolve in cold cream by stirring alone, and undissolved crystals give a gritty result. Whisk until no grain can be felt between the fingers, or warm a cup of the cream to dissolve the sugar and then chill the whole mixture thoroughly before churning.
- Cut the fat"Pure cream" here means heavy cream at around 36 percent fat or more, which can churn to butter grains if agitated too long in a modern machine. Replacing a quarter to a third of the cream with whole milk gives a smoother freeze without losing richness.
- Chill before churningThe mixture should go into the machine at refrigerator temperature or colder. Starting warm lengthens churning time, which is exactly what turns high-fat cream buttery.
- Extract quantityA tablespoon of vanilla in roughly three quarts is generous by current taste; 2 teaspoons is closer to modern proportion. Add it once the sugar is dissolved.
- RipeningStraight cream ice cream is soft when the churning stops. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer for two to three hours to firm up; without stabilizers it also hardens icy after a day, so it is best eaten the same evening.
"Straight" ice cream means nothing but cream, sugar and flavoring, with no custard base, no gelatin and no cornstarch to stretch it. American cooks called this style Philadelphia ice cream, in contrast to the egg-thickened French or custard sort, and it was the mark of a household that could get its hands on plenty of good cream. Recipes like this one belong to the era of the hand-crank freezer, when ice cut from ponds in winter and stored in ice houses made summer freezing possible for ordinary kitchens. The instruction to leave room for expansion is the one piece of practical wisdom in the entry, and it is the sort of shorthand that assumes the reader has stood over a freezer bucket before.