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Eggless Ice-Cream
A scant tea-cup flour to two quarts new milk; put three pints on to boil (in tin pail set in a kettle of boiling water), mix the flour with the other pint till smooth, then stir it in the boiling milk; let it boil ten or fifteen minutes, and, just before taking it from the fire, stir in one and a half pounds pulverized sugar (any good white sugar will do). Care must be taken to stir all the time after putting in the sugar, only letting it remain a moment, or just long enough to dissolve it; take from stove, and strain at once through a crash towel. When cold, add one quart cream. Flavor with vanilla, in the proportion of one and a fourth table-spoons to a gallon. -Mrs. Libbie Dolbear.
A flour-thickened ice cream base of the kind common before cheap eggs and mechanical refrigeration made frozen custard the standard. The recipe gives you the base only; freezing was assumed knowledge.
- Cook the flour out fullyThe ten to fifteen minutes of boiling is the hinge. Cooked for less, a flour-thickened base can taste of raw paste; the time is there to cook the starch through, in the water bath the recipe specifies.
- The flour measure is vagueA period tea-cup is commonly reckoned at somewhere between half and three-quarters of a modern cup, and "scant" trims it further, so read this as roughly 2/3 to 3/4 cup of flour for two quarts of milk. Treat it as a starting point rather than a fixed figure.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the day's milking. Ordinary whole milk is the substitute; skim or 2 percent will give a thin, icy result.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar was simply finely ground white sugar, without the cornstarch that modern confectioners' sugar carries. Use superfine (caster) sugar, or plain granulated, at about 3 1/3 cups for the pound and a half. The recipe itself allows "any good white sugar".
- Add the sugar last and brieflySugar slackens a starch-thickened base. Stir constantly and pull it from the heat as soon as the sugar dissolves, as the recipe says.
- Tin pail in a kettleThis is a double boiler. Any heatproof bowl or pot set over simmering water works, and it is worth the trouble here because a flour base catches easily over direct heat.
- Crash towelCrash was a coarse loose-woven linen. Strain through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth to catch lumps and skin while the base is still hot.
- Chilling and freezingCool the base completely, ideally overnight, before stirring in the quart of cream and the vanilla; a warm base freezes coarse. The original expected a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, but the mixture goes into a modern machine unchanged.
- YieldAbout a gallon, given the flavoring proportion quoted. That is a party quantity by modern standards, and the base halves cleanly.
Cornstarch and flour bases, sometimes called Philadelphia-style when made with cream alone and, by some accounts, "boiled" or "mock" custard when thickened with starch, gave a firmer, chewier body that held up in the salt-and-ice freezers of the 1880s, when a churn had to be cranked by hand. Eggs were seasonal; flour was always in the barrel. The Dixie Cook-Book collected recipes by contributor name, and this one carries Mrs. Libbie Dolbear's, a reminder that such books were community compilations, each family's version of a common dish set down beside the others.