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Philadelphia Ice Cream
Cook 8 pounds sugar in 2 gallons cream. Bring it to a boil, when it should resemble skim milk; add and work in an additional 3 gallons of cream, 6 eggs and 2 ounces of vanilla. It is now ready for freezing.
This is a soda-fountain batch formula rather than a home recipe, and its handling of the eggs is the reason it cannot be followed today.
- The eggs are never cookedSix eggs are worked into the mix after the boiled portion has been slackened with three gallons of cold cream, and the batch then goes straight to the freezer. The residual heat of two gallons of boiled cream diluted into three gallons of cold cream will not bring the mixture anywhere near a temperature that pasteurises egg, and freezing does not kill Salmonella — it simply preserves it. A modern frozen-custard recipe cooks the base to a measured temperature and holds it there before chilling.
- Raw milk assumptionsCream in the fountain trade may well have been unpasteurised, in which case the boiling step would have served for keeping quality as well as texture, though the recipe says nothing about either. What is plain from the text is that only two of the five gallons ever see a boil; the rest is added afterwards and relied on to be sound.
- ScaleThis makes something over five gallons of mix before freezing, a commercial rather than domestic quantity. Domestic equipment will not handle it, and no household freezer will chill it fast enough to keep the mixture out of the danger zone.
- "Resemble skim milk"The visual cue belongs to the sugar-and-cream boil: eight pounds of sugar dissolved into two gallons of cream thins and lightens it until it looks like skimmed milk. It reads most naturally as a test that the sugar has gone in, rather than a measure of how far the boil should be carried.
- Two ounces of vanillaPresumably fluid ounces of extract, though the recipe does not say so. Against five gallons of mix it is a light hand by modern standards.
- If you want the dishUse a current ice cream or frozen custard recipe with a cooked, temperature-verified base.
"Philadelphia ice cream" was, and largely still is, the trade name for ice cream made from cream, sugar and flavouring alone, with no eggs and no cooked custard — as distinct from "French" or "New York" ice cream, which is built on an egg-yolk custard. The label is generally traced to the city's nineteenth-century confectioners and their plain cream ices. That this fountain formula slips six eggs into a five-gallon batch shows how loosely the name travelled once it became a menu word: the eggs are far too few to make a custard. The book it appears in is a dispenser's manual, written for the man behind the marble counter who needed batch quantities in pounds and gallons rather than cups.