Home › Ice-Creams and Frozen Desserts › American Ice-Cream
American Ice-Cream
1 pint milk
2 egg-yolks
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup sugar
Scald the milk, stirring constantly. Mix the flour and cold water to a smooth paste and add to it slowly the scalded milk, continuing the stirring. When thickened, cook over hot water for about fifteen minutes. Add sugar and beaten egg-yolks and cook two minutes. Strain the custard through a fine sieve and, when cold, add the cream and vanilla and freeze. This makes a smooth, rich cream.
For variation, use dark-brown sugar or maple sugar instead of the white sugar.
A flour-thickened custard base, the economical American answer to an all-cream Philadelphia ice-cream. It translates directly to a modern machine, with one caveat about how long the yolks actually cook.
- The hinge: cook the custard properlyTwo minutes after the yolks go in is the minimum, not the target. Hold the custard at 170-175F until it coats a spoon; the flour protects it from curdling, so there is room to be patient.
- Cook over hot water means a double boilerThe fifteen minutes over simmering water is not idle time. It cooks the raw starch out of the flour, which is what keeps the finished cream from tasting pasty.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. In a modern churn, chill the base thoroughly first, ideally overnight, and churn 20-25 minutes.
- Add a pinch of saltThe recipe omits it. A scant quarter teaspoon in the custard sharpens the vanilla and the dairy noticeably.
- Heavy creamPeriod heavy cream was broadly comparable in richness to modern heavy whipping cream. Do not substitute half-and-half; there is only one cup carrying all the richness.
- Maple sugarGranulated maple sugar is still sold, though it is expensive.
- YieldAbout a quart of base, and noticeably more once churned. It will freeze hard in a home freezer, so let it stand ten minutes before scooping.
American cookbooks of the early twentieth century drew a clear line between two ice-creams: Philadelphia ice-cream, which was nothing but cream, sugar and flavouring frozen without eggs, and the custard-based sort, often called American or French depending on the writer. This version splits the difference and then economises further, using flour as well as yolks to build body from a pint of milk and only a single cup of cream. That flour is the tell. Before commercial stabilisers, starch was a common household expedient against a coarse, icy texture in a hand-cranked freezer, where churning was uneven and the mixture froze faster at the walls than the centre.