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Vanilla Ice Cream--Best
1 quart of good sweet cream. 8 ounces of sugar.
Vanilla flavoring--either 2 tablespoonfuls of the extract or a vanilla bean boiled in a little milk and the milk used to flavor. Use a freezer that will hold twice as much or more. Sweeten and flavor the cream and churn it in a pail with a whip--churn till half of it is froth. Pour it into the freezer and freeze it as rapidly as possible. Then take out the inside beater and with a wooden paddle about four feet long, made like a spade in shape but narrow, beat the ice--cream about 15 minutes, or till it fills the freezer. Cover down and pack with more ice and salt.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no custard, just cream, sugar and vanilla. The whole trick is air, and the instructions are written for a hand-crank tub in a bakery, not a countertop machine.
- The hinge: whip firstChurning the cream to a half-froth before it ever reaches the freezer is what gives this its body. With no eggs and no cooked base, the aeration is the only thing standing between you and a block of sweet ice.
- Sugar by weightEight ounces of sugar is about one cup of granulated.
- "Freezer" means the bucketA freezer here is a hand-cranked wooden tub packed with crushed ice and rock salt around a metal canister. Sizing it at double capacity leaves room for the mixture to expand as air is worked in.
- Ice and salt proportionsThe original assumes you know them: roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, layered around the can. Table salt works but dissolves too fast and is wasteful at this scale.
- The four-foot paddleThat is a commercial-scale tool. In a domestic batch, pulling the dasher and working the frozen cream vigorously with a stout wooden spoon or spatula for a few minutes accomplishes the same thing: breaking ice crystals and folding in air.
- Vanilla bean methodSplit one bean, simmer it in a few tablespoons of milk, cool, then strain into the cream. Two tablespoons of extract is generous by current taste; one is usually enough with good vanilla.
- Packing downThe final packing in ice and salt is the ripening or hardening stage, and it is not optional. An hour or two firms the texture; in a home freezer, transfer to a chilled container and harden for at least three hours.
- YieldA quart of cream plus the air beaten into it gives roughly a generous half gallon finished, serving eight to ten.
- If using a modern machineWhip the sweetened cream to soft froth first as directed, then churn. Do not fill the canister more than half full or the expansion has nowhere to go.
Ice cream made from cream, sugar and flavoring alone, without eggs, came to be called Philadelphia-style in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, distinguishing it from the French custard base. The label is often traced to the city's reputation for good dairy, though that connection is traditional rather than documented. The four-foot paddle is a working detail that gives away the scale. The insistence on beating the cream to froth before freezing reflects an interest in overrun, the volume of air worked into the mix, which determines both texture and how many portions a quart of cream will yield.