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White Starch Ice Cream
1 quart of rich milk. 12 ounces of sugar. 1 ounce of butter. 2 rounded tablespoonfuls of corn starch. 4 whites of eggs. 1 tablespoonful of lemon extract.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it. Mix the starch in a cup with a little cold milk and stir it in Take from the fire, and put in the butter and beat the mixture till that is melted. Strain, cool and flavor it and freeze. When nearly finished freezing whip the whites to froth and stir them into the cream, then beat it with a paddle till it fills the freezer, and is as light as foam and white as snow.
A late nineteenth-century "starch" ice cream — a cornstarch-thickened milk base rather than a custard — stretched and lightened at the end with raw beaten egg white. The base itself is unremarkable; the finish is the problem.
- Why not as writtenFour egg whites are whipped raw and stirred into a cream that has already been taken off the heat, cooled and part-frozen. Nothing after that point brings them anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves bacteria rather than destroying them. Shell eggs today are not safe eaten raw unless pasteurized; use a current ice cream recipe instead.
- The rest of the base is soundMilk scalded with sugar and thickened with cornstarch, enriched with a little butter, is essentially a thin blancmange and is fully cooked. It is only the final addition that puts the finished cream out of range.
- "Rich milk"In this period the term generally meant unhomogenised whole milk with the cream still in it, probably richer than today's whole milk. Modern whole milk alone is likely to freeze harder and icier.
- Corn starchSame product as today's cornstarch. Two rounded tablespoonfuls to a quart is a modest thickening: a pourable, lightly set base rather than a stiff pudding. The recipe directs that it be strained, which guards against lumps.
- Lemon extractA full tablespoonful in a quart. Period extract strengths were unstandardised and are not directly comparable with today's commercial extracts, so the quantity should be treated with caution rather than copied straight across.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, where the cook opens the can, scrapes the sides and works the mixture with a wooden paddle or spatula. "Beat it with a paddle till it fills the freezer" is the overrun step — beating air in by hand, which is what a modern machine's dasher does continuously.
Cornstarch-thickened ice creams were common in the later nineteenth century, appearing in commercial and confectioners' manuals as well as in domestic cookbooks. Cornstarch was cheaper than eggs and less liable to curdle than a custard. The whipped whites at the end lighten the body and increase the volume obtained from a given quart of milk.