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Ice Cream
M.
One pint milk, yolks of two eggs, six ounces sugar, one tablespoon of corn starch; scald until it thickens; when cool, add one pint whipped cream and the whites of two eggs, beaten stiff; sweeten, flavour, and freeze.
A cornstarch-and-yolk custard lightened with whipped cream and beaten whites — a common economical formula in the era of the hand-crank freezer. One step in it cannot be reconciled with modern food safety.
- Why not as writtenThe two egg whites are beaten stiff and folded into a base that has already cooled, then frozen. They are never heated at any point. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and the mixture then sits in a churn at a temperature where nothing is destroyed. Use a current ice cream recipe if you want this style of dessert.
- The yolks are not the problemThe yolks go into the milk and are scalded until the mixture thickens, which is a genuine cooked custard. The recipe's structure means half the egg is safe and half is not, which is easy to miss on a quick read.
- "Sweeten, flavour"The original assumes the cook adds vanilla, lemon, or whatever extract is at hand, and adjusts sugar by taste after the cream goes in — six ounces is only the custard's share. Nineteenth-century receipts routinely left flavouring to the cook's judgement.
- Six ounces sugarA weight, not a volume: something like seven-eighths of a cup of granulated sugar. Old cookbooks switch between weight and spoon measures within a single line without comment.
- Scalded milk"Scald until it thickens" means brought just below the boil and held there while stirring, not boiled. With cornstarch as well as yolk the mixture sets more firmly and is less liable to curdle than a pure custard, which is probably why the starch is there.
- YieldA pint of milk plus a pint of cream and the whites gives something close to a quart and a half once churned — about six servings by modern portions, rather more by 1870s ones.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago) first appeared in 1874, with later printings, and was compiled from contributions by local women and sold for charity. Some of its receipts are signed only with an initial — this one is simply "M." Ice cream appears in such books in quantity because the American ice trade had made it briefly and genuinely democratic: harvested lake and river ice, packed in sawdust in commercial ice houses, reached ordinary city kitchens cheaply enough that a household with a hand-crank freezer and a bag of rock salt could make a frozen dessert on a summer afternoon. The cornstarch is the tell of a thrifty formula: it thickens the milk so that fewer eggs and less cream are needed, and it guards against a curdled custard in the hands of a cook working over an uncontrollable range. Recipes of this kind, half cooked custard and half raw beaten white, were standard for decades before egg-borne illness was understood.