six cups of sugar
Does six cups of sugar sound like an awful lot to use when your parents have gone out of town, they've left you to your own devices, and you want to make some ice-cream? Turns out it's not, even if you're only making enough ice-cream for four children to enjoy before chore-time.

Custard used for custard pies can also be used to make ice cream. While Almanzo and Royal were pounding ice to do the "freezing" part, Alice and Eliza Jane whipped up an egg custard using six cups of sugar (the only definite measure Laura Ingalls Wilder gives us in Farmer Boy), and (perhaps) 6 eggs, separated, 10 tablespoons of flour or some other thickening agent such as arrowroot, 2 quarts of cream/milk mixture (more cream than milk), a dash of salt, and maybe some flavoring. One assumes from Farmer Boy that the ice-cream is plain egg custard, but in the manuscript, it was flavored with wintergreen.

To make custard, one scalds the milk and cream and adds the sugar, flour and salt. Add the beaten egg yolks and cook until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture has thickened. When cool, add stiffly-beaten egg whites and the flavoring. Freeze. This makes THREE GALLONS of ice cream. Add a whole cake to that, and is it no wonder that the siblings didn't want any dinner that night? One early recipe I found suggests that using two quarts of milk/cream will make enough ice-cream for thirty-five persons. Make that three children and one growing farmer boy...

The Wilders didn't have one of the new-fangled patent ice-cream freezers like the one shown in the illustration. Like threshing their wheat with flails, they must have preferred to make ice-cream the old-fashioned way, in a tin pail surrounded by ice and salt to do the freezing, with frequent stirring. Crank ice-cream freezers had only been around for a dozen or so years, and early cookbooks often included suggestions as to how to tell your "tinner" to construct a container to be used only for making ice-cream: one author suggested that it was to be 8 inches in diameter and 18 inches tall, and slightly larger at the top than bottom, so that the ice-cream could be removed in a solid piece and served in slices. The container was to have a fitted top with a handle on it, and the whole affair should only cost around fifty cents.

In the Farmer Boy manuscript, in addition to the blacking brush being thrown (but at Alice, not Eliza Jane!)there was an added bit about Eliza Jane and Royal getting into an argument and managing to spill a whole pail full of milk on the floor, and although they knew it would ruin the paint (are the floors in the Wilder house still painted?), they left it there and walked around it rather than clean up the mess.

It would have been cute if Almanzo had let the barn cats inside to lap it up.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:30 PM