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No. 5
Three quarts cream, 3 quarts milk, not skimmed, 11/½ dozen eggs, 2 pounds granulated sugar, 1 ounce American Concentrated Vanilla Extract. Dissolve the sugar in milk and cream, and add the beaten eggs and flavoring. Mix well and freeze.
This is a soda-fountain ice cream base in commercial quantity, and it is a raw one: the eggs go into cold milk and cream and straight into the freezer, never cooked. The notes below explain the arithmetic and the vessels, but the dish itself belongs to the era before egg pasteurisation.
- Raw eggs, never heatedThe eggs are beaten into cold dairy and frozen. Nothing in the method brings the mixture to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them. Modern ice cream custards are cooked to about 170F, or made with pasteurised eggs, for exactly this reason. Use a current recipe.
- The egg count is garbled"11/½ dozen eggs" is a printer's error. It is most likely 1½ dozen, that is eighteen eggs, which is proportionate to six quarts of dairy. Eleven and a half dozen would be 138 eggs and would produce something closer to a frozen omelette.
- ScaleThree quarts cream plus three quarts milk plus the eggs and sugar comes to something under two gallons of base, yielding more once air is beaten in during churning. This is a shop batch, not a household one.
- "American Concentrated Vanilla Extract"The capitalisation points to a proprietary product rather than a generic extract, though nothing here records its strength. An ounce of it in this quantity of base is not a reliable guide to how much ordinary supermarket vanilla extract a modern batch would want.
- Sugar levelTwo pounds of sugar to six quarts of dairy works out at roughly 12 percent of the mix by weight, at or a little below modern practice. Sugar depresses the freezing point, so a leaner base freezes harder -- acceptable when it was scooped straight from a brine-packed can, less so from a home freezer.
- "Freeze"At the time this meant a hand- or motor-cranked can set in a tub of cracked ice and rock salt, churned until the paddle stiffened, then packed down to ripen. The instruction assumes equipment and a working knowledge the book's readers already had.
The American Soda Book belongs to a specific trade literature: formularies written for druggists, who ran the soda fountain as a sideline to the prescription counter and needed standardised recipes for syrups, phosphates, and ice creams by the gallon. The entries are numbered, each a small variation in richness or flavour. An uncooked base -- cream, milk, sugar, flavouring, mixed cold and frozen at once -- was common American practice and contrasted with the cooked French custard; strictly, it was the eggless version that went by the name "Philadelphia". The recipe specifies a named proprietary extract, as such manuals often did.