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Kentucky Cream
Make a half gallon rich boiled custard, sweeten to taste, add two table-spoons gelatine dissolved in a half cup cold milk; let the custard cool, put it in freezer, and as soon as it begins to freeze, add one pound raisins, one pint strawberry preserves, one quart whipped cream; stir and beat well like ice-cream. Blanched almonds or grated cocoa-nut are additions. Some prefer currants to raisins, and some also add citron chopped fine. - Mrs. Gov. J. B. McCreary, Kentucky.
This is a frozen custard in the old bucket-freezer style, closer to a tutti-frutti than to plain ice cream. The scale is a party scale: half a gallon of custard plus a quart of whipped cream and two pounds of fruit finishes out well over a gallon.
- The hinge: dissolve the gelatine into warm custardSoften the gelatine in the half cup of cold milk, then stir it into the custard while the custard is still hot, before cooling. Added to cold custard it will set into threads and rubbery specks that never disperse.
- "Rich boiled custard"A stirred custard, not a baked one, in roughly the proportion of 6 to 8 yolks and a cup of sugar per quart of milk or half-and-half. Cook over low heat or a water bath to 170-180F, until it coats a spoon; at a true boil it curdles.
- Gelatine measureTwo tablespoons of modern powdered gelatin is between two and three envelopes, and that is a lot for two quarts of custard. Period gelatine was less consistent than modern powder and may well have set weaker, so a tablespoon of powder is probably nearer the intended body; more than that gives a chewy result.
- "Freezer"A hand-cranked bucket surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, holding a gallon or more. A domestic machine takes 1 1/2 to 2 quarts of mixture at a time, so this batch needs two or three turns, or a still-frozen pan method with periodic beating.
- When to add the fruitThe instruction to wait until it "begins to freeze" matters. Raisins, preserves and whipped cream folded into liquid custard sink or deflate; the mixture should be at soft-serve thickness first.
- Sugar load and textureA pint of strawberry preserves is largely sugar, and sugar depresses the freezing point. Expect a soft, slow-hardening cream that wants two to four hours in the coldest part of the freezer to firm up, and that softens quickly on the table.
- Ingredients to translateCocoa-nut means fresh coconut, grated; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest stand-in. Citron is candied peel, usually of the citron fruit, sold around Christmas. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Plump the raisins or currants in warm water or bourbon and drain them, or they freeze into pebbles.
- YieldWell over a gallon of finished cream, twenty-plus servings. Halve everything for a household batch.
The contributor is identified as the wife of James B. McCreary, the Kentucky lawyer and Confederate veteran who was governor of the state from 1875 to 1879 and again from 1911 to 1915. The dish itself sits squarely in a Kentucky tradition, where "boiled custard" is a drink and a dessert base of long standing, richer with egg than the ordinary custard of Northern books. Freezing that custard with raisins, preserves, almonds and citron makes what other nineteenth-century books call a tutti-frutti, and such recipes circulated loosely in print: each household made it with whatever candied and preserved fruit the pantry held.