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Yellow Frozen Custard
1 quart of cream or milk. 12 ounces of sugar. 12 yolks of eggs. Vanilla bean or extract to flavor.
Boil the cream with the sugar and vanilla bean in it. Beat the yolks light and pour the boiling cream to them. Set on the fire again for a minute. The custard will not froth in the freezer if cooked much, but should be taken off and strained as soon as slightly thickened. Freeze and beat light.
This is a classic yolk-rich custard base — essentially crème anglaise — churned into ice cream. The whole recipe turns on how far you cook the eggs.
- The hinge: stop at nappeTake the custard off the heat the moment it thickens enough to coat a spoon, around 175-180F. Past that the yolks scramble, and as the original notes, an overcooked base will not whip up light in the freezer.
- Weights and volumes12 ounces of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups granulated. Twelve yolks from modern large eggs run about 3/4 cup — a very rich base by today's standards.
- Tempering"Pour the boiling cream to them" means in a thin stream while whisking constantly. Dumping it in at once will curdle the yolks before they ever reach the pan.
- Vanilla beanSplit one bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the cream, then add the pod; steep off the heat 15-20 minutes for more flavor before proceeding. If using extract, add it after straining, since heat drives off the aromatics.
- Chill before churningThe recipe goes straight from strainer to freezer, which suited a hand-crank tub packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine the base should be refrigerated to 40F or below — several hours, ideally overnight — or it will churn poorly.
- "Beat light"This is the churning itself: the paddle works air into the base as it freezes. In a compressor or frozen-bowl machine, 20-25 minutes is usually enough; longer and the fat begins to churn to butter.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten given the richness. Ripen it in the freezer an hour or two before serving for a firmer scoop.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to a run of late nineteenth-century manuals written by working pastry chefs for hotel and restaurant kitchens, where iced desserts were a daily line of production rather than an occasion. "Yellow" here is simply trade shorthand distinguishing an egg-yolk custard base from the plain sweetened-cream mixtures known as Philadelphia-style — the yellow versions were generally considered the French manner. Freezing meant a pewter or tin can set in a wooden tub packed with crushed ice and rock salt, cranked by hand and scraped down as the mixture set; the instruction to "beat light" describes the whole point of that labor, since air worked into the base is what separates ice cream from a frozen block of custard. Frozen custard as a named American commercial product came later, its origin usually traced to the seaside stands of Coney Island around 1919.