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Ice-Cream
The kind of cream usually made is composed of milk and a small proportion of cream, with eggs and sugar added to it. Dissolve one-half pound or so of sugar in one quart of milk, place it over the fire, and let it heat to the boiling point. In the meantime beat three eggs, pour the boiling milk into them, return to the fire, and stir until it begins to thicken. Then take it from the fire, stir again until quite smooth, flavor and allow it to cool. When cold, freeze it in the freezer.
This is a plain French-style custard base — the working template a hotel kitchen would flavor a dozen different ways. The whole thing turns on how far you take the custard on the stove.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boilStir over low heat until it coats the back of a spoon, around 170-175F. Past 180F the eggs scramble and no amount of stirring will bring it back smooth; strain through a fine sieve as insurance.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is 8 oz, about 1 1/8 cups granulated. "Or so" is Oscar hedging: modern custard ice creams usually run 6-7 oz per quart of dairy, and 8 oz will taste distinctly sweet by current standards.
- Three eggsWhole eggs, beaten, as written — whole-egg ice creams were common in the period. Yolks alone (5-6) give a richer, less eggy body. Eggs then were not graded to a fixed size and were often smaller than today's large egg, so three large eggs is if anything generous.
- Tempering"Pour the boiling milk into them" works only if you pour in a thin stream while whisking hard, and even then it is safer to add a cup first, then the rest. Dumping a quart of scalding milk onto three beaten eggs curdles them.
- "A small proportion of cream"Unquantified, and it matters. Milk alone freezes hard and icy; figure at least 1 cup heavy cream in place of an equal amount of the milk, more if you want a scoopable texture from a home machine.
- FlavoringAdd extracts, liqueurs and coffee after the custard is off the heat, since heat drives off volatile aromatics. A split vanilla bean, by contrast, should steep in the milk as it heats and be removed before churning.
- "Allow it to cool"Chill the custard thoroughly — refrigerate several hours or overnight. A warm base overworks any freezer and comes out grainy.
- "The freezer"In 1896 this is a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked 20-25 minutes. Any modern machine substitutes directly; expect to ripen the finished cream in the freezer an hour or two to firm up.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/4 quarts before freezing, serving six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, not a cook, and his 1896 book reads like a house reference: the basic formulas a large kitchen worked from, with the variations left to the chef. This entry is the frozen-custard base — what confectioners of the era distinguished from "Philadelphia" ice cream, which used cream and sugar alone with no eggs at all. That a New York hotel could turn out ice cream in quantity at all rested on the commercial ice trade, which by the 1890s put harvested lake ice and, increasingly, machine-made ice within reach of any city kitchen; rock salt to depress the freezing point of the surrounding ice was the other half of the equation. The hand-crank pail freezer, patented in the United States in the 1840s and refined for decades after, is the vessel Oscar means by "the freezer" — mechanical refrigeration was still a novelty in most kitchens when this was written.