Home › Recipes › Vanilla Ice Cream
Vanilla Ice Cream
Two cups cream, 2 cups milk, 1½ cups sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla or lemon extract, 4 eggs. Prepare and cook the ingredients in the same general way as given in the recipe for New York Ice Cream.
A plain cooked-custard ice cream that leans on a neighbouring recipe for its method. The two things worth knowing before you start are how to read the sugar quantity and how to handle a custard base.
- The sugar measurementThe printed page gives 1½ cups sugar, which is what the text now reads. Against 4 cups of dairy and 4 eggs that is a normal proportion; still, taste the cooled custard before freezing, since cold dulls sweetness.
- What "the same general way" meansThe method sits in the neighbouring New York Ice Cream entry, which is not repeated here; since the recipe directs you to cook the ingredients, the base is a stirred egg custard rather than a raw mixture. Cook it until it coats the spoon, then chill hard before freezing.
- Custard temperaturePull the custard at 170-175F. Past about 180F the eggs curdle and no amount of straining brings the texture back. Cooking over hot water rather than a direct flame makes overshooting much harder.
- Add the flavouring coldStir the vanilla or lemon extract into the custard after it has cooled, not while it is hot. Alcohol-based extracts lose a good deal of their aroma to steam.
- Chill before churningThe base should go into the freezer at 40F or below, which in practice means several hours or overnight in the refrigerator. A warm base churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- Freezing equipmentA recipe of this date would have been frozen in a hand-crank bucket freezer, packed with crushed ice and rock salt. Any modern churn works; the mixture is a standard 4-cup custard base and fits a 1 1/2 to 2 quart machine.
- RipeningIce cream straight from the churn is soft. Pack it and let it harden two to four hours in the freezer, or in the old manner under fresh ice and salt with the dasher removed.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight.
Custard-based ice cream of this kind - eggs, cream, milk and sugar cooked together, then frozen while stirred - was standard American practice by the late nineteenth century, and the fact that this entry simply refers back to "New York Ice Cream" tells you how routine the method had become in a household cookbook. The great change of the period was the hand-crank freezer with its inner can and dasher, which is generally said to have spread through American kitchens over the course of the nineteenth century and turned ice cream from a confectioner's luxury into something a family could make at home, provided they could get ice and rock salt. The offhand "vanilla or lemon extract" is also of its time: bottled extracts were by then widely available, and a cook who might once have infused a split bean now reached for a bottle.