Home › Unusual Recipes › French Ice Cream
French Ice Cream
3 cups milk 1½ cups Karo, Red Label 1 1/2 tablespoons Argo or 3 egg yolks Few grains salt 1½ teaspoons vanilla 1 cup heavy cream 1/2 cup sugar Kingsford's Cornstarch Scald milk, Karo and sugar and thicken with the cornstarch dissolved in an equal quantity of cold milk. Cook fifteen minutes, stir in the egg yolks well beaten and combined with a little of the thickened mixture. Chill, add salt, flavoring and cream, and freeze, packing with three parts of cracked ice to one of rock salt.
A corn-syrup custard base from a promotional booklet issued by the makers of Karo, Argo and Kingsford's — all Corn Products Refining Company brands, which is why three of them appear in one short list. It churns into a soft, slow-melting ice cream.
- The brand namesArgo and Kingsford's were both cornstarch labels; the recipe means one or the other, not both. Any modern cornstarch works. The printed quantity is garbled in this copy, reading as either 1/2 or 1 1/2 tablespoons.
- Karo Red LabelRed Label was, in this period, the golden lightly flavoured corn syrup and Blue Label the clear one (the modern labels no longer match). Ordinary light corn syrup is the closest current match. It is there for texture as much as sweetness — corn syrup's glucose and other non-crystallising sugars lower the freezing point and keep the ice cream from freezing hard and grainy.
- The egg yolksBeat the yolks, temper them with a ladle of the hot starch mixture, then return everything to low heat and cook to 170-175F, stirring, before chilling. As written the yolks may not reach a safe temperature, and a custard finished on the heat is thicker and smoother besides.
- Cooking the starchFifteen minutes over direct heat will scorch. Use a double boiler or the lowest burner setting, stirring often; the mixture needs that long only to lose its raw starch taste.
- Chill properlyCool the base to refrigerator temperature — several hours, or overnight — before adding the cream and freezing. A warm base churns to coarse ice crystals no matter what machine you use.
- Ice and saltThree parts cracked ice to one part rock salt by volume is a standard hand-crank ratio, giving a brine cold enough to freeze but not so cold that the outside sets before the paddle can work. In a modern compressor churn, ignore this and freeze 20-30 minutes; in a frozen-bowl machine, the bowl needs at least 12 to 24 hours in the freezer, per the maker's instructions.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or eight to ten servings. Ripen in the freezer an hour after churning before serving.
"French" ice cream, in American usage from the late nineteenth century onward, simply meant a cooked egg-yolk custard base as against "Philadelphia" ice cream, which was cream, sugar and flavouring frozen with no eggs at all. This version hedges further by thickening with cornstarch as well as yolks, and Karo syrup, Argo starch and Kingsford's starch were all sold by the Corn Products Refining Company. The corn syrup does real work, though: invert sugars soften the freeze, and commercial ice cream still relies on the same principle today.