Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Fig Ice Cream
Fig Ice Cream
3 cups milk 1 cup sugar Yolks 5 eggs 1 teaspoon salt 1 lb. figs, finely chopped 1½ cups heavy cream Whites 5 eggs 1 tablespoon vanilla 2 tablespoons brandy Make custard of yolks of eggs, sugar, and milk; strain, add figs, cool, and flavor. Add whites of eggs beaten until stiff and heavy cream beaten until stiff; freeze and mould.
A late-Victorian frozen custard in the French style, stretched with stiff egg whites and whipped cream. The custard base is cooked; the whites folded in at the end never are, which is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- Why the cautionFive raw egg whites are beaten stiff and folded into a base that is only chilled and frozen from that point on. Freezing does not kill Salmonella, and shell eggs are the classic vehicle for it; the whites here never reach any temperature that would make them safe. Use a current frozen-custard recipe instead.
- The custard itselfYolks, sugar and milk cooked to a custard is sound technique, and a custard taken to the usual coating stage is generally hot enough to pasteurise the yolks, though the recipe itself gives no temperature or doneness cue. It is only the later addition of the uncooked whites that puts the finished cream out of range.
- Straining"Strain" is in the original, not an optional step: it removes the threads of set egg that form on the pan bottom. Cheesecloth or a fine wire sieve would have served.
- The figs"1 lb. figs" almost certainly means dried figs, which were then sold pressed in blocks or strung. They would need their hard stem tips cut off, and being drier than modern soft-packed figs they were presumably left to soften in the warm custard as it cooled, which is the order the recipe gives.
- The saltOne teaspoon of salt reads high for a sweet frozen dessert even by the standards of the period, and may be a compositor's error for a quarter or half teaspoon.
- "Freeze and mould"This means a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse rock salt, then the churned cream pressed into a metal mould, sealed, and buried in more ice and salt for some hours to ripen and set. Nothing in the instruction refers to a domestic freezer of the modern kind.
- The brandyAlcohol lowers the freezing point, though two tablespoons in a batch of this size is a modest amount; any effect would be a slightly softer set rather than a mixture that cannot firm up.
- YieldWith whipped cream and beaten whites folded in this makes a large quantity, plausibly around two quarts finished, though the recipe fixes no yield. It is a dinner-party amount, consistent with the moulded presentation.
Fig ice cream belongs to a moment when dried Smyrna and Californian figs were a store an American household could keep in the pantry year round, and the ices chapter of a cookery book was expected to show what could be done with stores rather than with whatever was ripe. The construction is a compromise: a cooked French custard for richness, then stiff egg whites and whipped cream beaten in to lighten a mixture that a hand-crank freezer would otherwise turn dense and icy. Moulding was much of the social point of such a dish -- the sealed pewter or tin mould buried in ice and salt, then dipped and turned out at table in the shape of a melon, a pyramid or a sheaf of wheat. The technique is generally traced to French confectioners' practice, and it explains why the recipe ends with an instruction that assumes equipment no modern reader owns.