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Ice Cream (To each quart of cream add one)
To each quart of cream add one cup of white corn syrup and one teaspoon of vanilla. Freeze, and serve plain or with English walnuts, chopped, over the top.
Three ingredients and no custard: this is Philadelphia-style ice cream, and the only real work is the freezing. Two points decide whether it comes out smooth or grainy — the syrup, and how hard you chill everything before churning.
- Why corn syrupThe cup of white corn syrup is not just sweetening; glucose syrup interferes with ice-crystal growth and helps keep the texture soft, which is one reason an uncooked, eggless base can still come out smooth. One cup is about 11 oz / 320 g. Substituting granulated sugar by volume will give a sweeter, icier, harder result.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe recipe does not say how; in a book of this date it would ordinarily mean a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked 20–30 minutes. A modern electric machine or a frozen-bowl churn does the same job; the mixture should go in at refrigerator temperature or colder.
- Chill the mixture firstStir the syrup and vanilla into the cream and hold it in the refrigerator for several hours before churning. Cream churned warm freezes slowly, and slow freezing is what makes coarse crystals.
- All-cream base can turn to butterA full quart of modern heavy cream (36–40% fat) agitated in a churn can break and go buttery. Using half heavy cream and half whole milk gives a base closer to the lighter "cream" of the period and is more forgiving in a machine.
- RipeningStraight from the churn it is soft-serve. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two before serving; the original assumed the packed freezer, drained and repacked with ice and salt, did this.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts after churning, or eight modest servings. The chopped English walnuts go on at the table, not into the churn, where they would freeze hard and dull.
- VanillaOne teaspoon in a quart is restrained by current taste. Two teaspoons of good extract, or the seeds of a vanilla bean steeped in the warmed cream and then cooled, reads as vanilla ice cream to a modern palate.
Recipes like this one sit alongside the corn-syrup industry's early promotional push: refined white corn syrup became a widely marketed grocery item in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, and manufacturers pressed it on home cooks through booklets and newspaper columns as a substitute for or partner to sugar. Its appearance in a bride's cookbook — a genre aimed squarely at the inexperienced housekeeper — reflects both that marketing and a genuine practical advantage the makers were quick to claim, since glucose syrup does suppress crystallization in frozen desserts. The style itself is older: uncooked sweetened cream frozen without eggs has long been called Philadelphia ice cream, generally traced to nineteenth-century American practice and set against the richer French egg custard bases. The chopped English walnuts are scattered over the top, added at the table rather than folded in.