Frosted Egg-Nog

This is a soda-fountain freezer recipe from the era when a druggist made his own ice cream in a hand-cranked or brine freezer. As written it is a raw-egg custard that is never heated, and that is the reason it cannot be made today.

• Raw eggs, never cookedTwelve eggs are beaten with sugar, mixed into cold milk and cream, and frozen. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria; it does not destroy them, and the thawed spoonfuls at the edge of the cup are an ideal growth medium.
• The alcohol does nothingSix ounces of spirits spread through roughly two and a half gallons of base is well under one percent by volume. Traditional aged eggnog relies on far higher alcohol concentrations held for weeks; this is a flavouring, not a preservative. A current recipe using a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs should be used instead.
• ScaleOne gallon of milk plus a gallon and a half of cream, before overrun from churning, is a commercial batch -- on the order of eighty to a hundred sherbet cups at about four ounces each. A quantity on this scale points to a formula written for a shop rather than a household.
• "Sweet milk"Simply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which nineteenth-century kitchens kept as a separate working ingredient.
• "Freeze"In this period this meant packing the can in a churn surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt and cranking until stiff. There is no cooking step anywhere in the instruction -- the word covers the entire process.
• Jamaica rum and French brandyPeriod trade terms rather than brands: dark, heavily estery pot-still rum from Jamaica, and Cognac-type grape brandy. Both dilution and freezing blunt flavour considerably.