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Frozen Custard
1 quart milk 1½ cups Karo, Red Label 3 tablespoons Argo or Kings. ford's Cornstarch 1/4 teaspoon salt 4 egg yolks 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Scald the milk with the Karo and stir in the cornstarch, salt and egg yolks beaten together. Cook over hot water, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and coats the spoon-at least ten minutes, strain. Add vanilla, chill and freeze in an ice cream freezer with three parts cracked ice to one of rock salt.
A cooked custard base built on cornstarch and corn syrup rather than cream — a product booklet recipe, but a sound one, since invert sugar keeps the ice crystals small in a hand-crank freezer.
- Karo Red LabelLabel colours have shifted over the years, so this is genuinely ambiguous. In the period this booklet was written, Red Label was the darker, more strongly flavoured Karo. For a plain vanilla custard use light corn syrup; dark syrup will push it toward caramel and butterscotch.
- Argo and Kingsford'sBoth were cornstarch brands owned by the same company that made Karo. Any plain cornstarch works; do not substitute a starch blend or instant thickener.
- Cook over hot waterA double boiler, water simmering but not touching the upper pan. The ten minutes is not padding — cornstarch needs sustained heat to gelatinise fully and lose its raw taste, and the water bath keeps the yolks from scrambling while it gets there.
- Coats the spoonDraw a finger through the custard on the back of the spoon; the track should hold its edges. With cornstarch present the mixture will be noticeably thicker than a plain stirred custard.
- Chill thoroughlyThe recipe says chill without saying how far. Get it to refrigerator temperature at least, overnight if possible; a warm base churns into coarse ice.
- Ice and saltThree parts cracked ice to one part rock salt is normally understood as a volume measure, and it is a fairly salty mix that freezes fast. Twenty to thirty minutes of steady cranking is usual, after which the custard is soft and wants an hour packed in ice and salt, or in the freezer, to firm up.
- Modern machineThe base works unchanged in any domestic ice cream maker. No ice or salt needed with a frozen-bowl or compressor model.
- YieldThe base comes to roughly a quart and a half before churning, and somewhat more once air is worked in; serves six to eight. It is sweet by current standards; the syrup can be cut to a cup, though the texture will be slightly firmer and icier.
This is a page from a corporate recipe booklet — Karo syrup, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and the recipes in such pamphlets exist to demonstrate that the company's syrup and starch can do the work of sugar, cream and flour. The economy is real, though: corn syrup interferes with ice crystal growth and gives a smoother frozen custard than cane sugar alone, and the cornstarch stabilises the yolks so the base can be cooked hard without curdling and holds body in place of heavy cream. Frozen custard in the American sense simply means an egg-enriched ice cream, distinguished from the eggless Philadelphia style; the dense, soft-served version associated with Coney Island and the Midwest is generally traced to the same decades. The instruction to pack three parts ice to one of rock salt places this squarely in the era of the hand-crank freezer, before mechanical home refrigeration made ice cream a matter of a bowl and a switch.