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Ice-Cream (Three pints sweet cream quart)
Three pints sweet cream, quart new milk, pint powdered sugar, the whites of two eggs beaten light, table-spoon vanilla; put in freezer till thoroughly chilled through, and then freeze. This is very easily made. - Mrs. Cogswell,
A plain uncooked cream ice of the sort that dominated American ice-cream making before mechanical refrigeration. Several of its terms no longer mean what they say, and its egg whites are the reason it cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe whites go in beaten and uncooked, and nothing in the method brings the mixture above room temperature. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and a churned mixture distributes any contamination evenly through the whole batch. A modern cooked-custard base or an eggless recipe should be used instead.
- "New milk" and "sweet cream""New milk" is a nineteenth-century term for milk fresh from the animal; "sweet" means simply not soured, not sugared. Dairy at this date would almost certainly have been unpasteurized, which compounds the hazard of a no-cook base.
- The "freezer"Not an appliance. This is a wooden pail holding an inner metal can, packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, with a hand crank and a dasher. "Put in freezer till thoroughly chilled through, and then freeze" most likely means resting the can in the ice bath before cranking begins.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the phrase means granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. A pint measured by volume is roughly two cups.
- Volume, not weightAll the quantities here are measured by volume, as was standard in American books of this period. Three pints of cream plus a quart of milk is ten cups of liquid; with the pint of sugar and the air worked in by the dasher, the finished yield would have been three quarts or more.
- A tablespoon of vanillaGenerous by modern standards, and a reminder that home extracts varied wildly in strength; commercial vanilla of the period was often thin, adulterated, or tonka-bean based.
Ice-cream recipes in The Dixie Cook Book assume a hand-crank freezer in the kitchen — a household object increasingly common in the United States from the 1860s onward, following the spread of the crank-and-dasher pail design generally credited to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s. What made ice-cream a summer staple rather than a luxury was the ice trade: harvested lake ice, packed in sawdust and shipped south, put frozen desserts within reach of families with a cellar or an icehouse. The recipe's brevity and its attribution to a named contributor are typical of the book's compilation method, which gathered dishes credited to individuals rather than to a single author. The flat closing remark — "This is very easily made" — sets it apart from cooked-custard bases that required long stirring over the fire.