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Ice-Cream (One quart new milk two eggs)
One quart new milk, two eggs, two table-spoons corn starch; heat the milk in a dish set in hot water, then stir in the corn starch mixed smooth in a little of the milk; let it boil for one or two minutes, then remove from stove and cool, and stir in the egg and a half pound sugar. If to be extra nice, add a pint of rich cream, and one-fourth pound sugar, strain the mixture, and when cool add the flavoring, and freeze as follows: Prepare freezer in the usual manner, turn the crank one hundred times, then pour upon the ice and salt a quart boiling water from the tea-kettle. Fill up again with ice and salt, turn the crank fifty times one way and twenty-five the other (which serves to scrape the cream from sides of freezer); by this time it will turn very hard, indicating that the cream is frozen sufficiently. -Mrs. Wm. Herrick,
The instructions are clear enough, but the sequence has a defect that cannot be worked around within the recipe as printed.
- The eggs are never cookedThe milk and cornstarch are boiled, then removed from the stove and cooled, and only then are the eggs stirred in. The eggs never reach a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and the mixture goes straight into the freezer from there.
- Freezing is not a kill stepChurn-freezing chills and hardens the mixture but does not reliably destroy pathogens. Anything present in the raw egg can still be present in the finished ice cream. Use a current custard ice-cream recipe, which cooks the base with the eggs in it.
- "New milk" and "rich cream"New milk is fresh, unskimmed, unpasteurised milk straight from the cow; whole milk is the modern stand-in. "Rich cream" meant the fattiest cream a household could skim, and heavy cream is the nearest modern match.
- The double boiler"Heat the milk in a dish set in hot water" is a double boiler, used because scorched milk was a constant risk on a wood range with no temperature control.
- Sugar by weightHalf a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar; the optional additional quarter pound is a scant 2/3 cup. That is a heavily sweetened base by modern standards, though sugar also keeps hand-churned ice cream from freezing into a solid block.
- The crank countTurns of the crank stand in for minutes, the recipe's way of timing the churn. The quart of boiling water poured over the ice and salt appears to be meant to settle the packing so the brine sits tight against the can; reversing the crank scrapes the frozen film off the inner wall, as the recipe says.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most subscription cookbooks of the 1880s, was built from recipes signed by the women who sent them in, and Mrs. Wm. Herrick's contribution shows how ice cream had moved from a confectioner's luxury to something a household could manage. The hand-crank freezer with its inner can and outer bucket of ice and salt is generally credited to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s, and by the time this book appeared such freezers were cheap enough to be common domestic equipment. The cornstarch here is a thrift measure as much as a thickener, letting one quart of milk and two eggs stand in for the far larger number of yolks a French-style custard would demand, with the pint of cream added only when the cook wanted the result "extra nice."