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No. 3
Dissolve 5 teaspoonfuls of Oswego starch or arrowroot in a teacup of milk. Add to it the whites of 3 eggs well frothed and the yolk of I well beaten. Sweeten and boil half a gallon of new milk. As soon as it begins to boil, pour it in small quantities over the mixture of eggs and starch till about half the milk is taken out of the kettle. Then pour all back into the kettle, and stir a few moments. After it cools, add i quart of rich cream. Flavor with vanilla to suit, and freeze.
This is a starch-thickened custard base for vanilla ice cream, of the kind a fountain would freeze in a hand-cranked pail. The original assumes you know how much sugar you like and how to work an ice-and-salt freezer, so both need filling in.
- Oswego starchA brand name for cornstarch, from the Kingsford works at Oswego, New York; use plain cornstarch. Arrowroot, the stated alternative, sets softer and tastes cleaner, and is not interchangeable by weight with cornstarch in other applications.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured. Half a gallon is 8 cups; the quart of "rich cream" is best read as heavy cream.
- A teacupPeriod sources vary, reckoning a teacup at anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz; half to three-quarters of a modern cup. Slurry the cornstarch in it cold and smooth before the eggs go in, or you will get lumps that no amount of stirring later will fix.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. For a mix of this size, somewhere between 1 and 2 cups of sugar will suit most tastes; the mixture should taste distinctly sweeter warm than you want it frozen, because cold blunts sugar considerably.
- The hinge: temper, then don't boilAdding hot milk to the eggs and starch in small amounts is the whole technique. When it all goes back in the kettle, keep it below a simmer and stir constantly for two or three minutes until it thickens and coats a spoon; a hard boil will curdle the yolk and give a grainy base.
- Cool before the cream"After it cools" matters twice over. Cream stirred into a hot base loses body, and warm mix churns badly. Strain the custard, chill it thoroughly, and ideally hold it overnight before freezing.
- FreezingThe recipe's half gallon of milk plus a quart of cream comes to roughly 3 quarts of mix, which expands as it churns, so split it between batches unless your machine takes a full 4 quarts. In a bucket freezer, layer crushed ice with rock salt -- recommendations run from about 3:1 to 8:1 ice to salt -- and crank steadily; in an electric machine, expect 20 to 30 minutes to soft-serve consistency, then harden in the freezer for a few hours.
- Vanilla"To suit" most likely means vanilla extract, a tablespoon or so for this volume. Add it to the cold base, not the hot custard, since heat drives off the aromatics.
"Oswego starch" was the trade name of cornstarch made at Oswego, New York, which became common enough in American groceries that cookbooks used it as a generic term for the product, much as later writers wrote "Jell-O" for gelatin. The cornstarch here is doing the work of a stabilizer: it holds the mix together, keeps ice crystals small, and stretches expensive eggs and cream -- note that this base uses three whites to a single yolk, where a French-style custard would use yolks alone. The instruction to freeze, with no explanation of how, tells you the assumed reader already had an ice-and-salt freezer at hand.