Now…

I can finally answer a comment I received right after this week’s ice cream recipe was posted on Tuesday. It’s from Sally C of Tip of the Iceberg and it reads like so:

You know, when I was a little girl, one of my friend’s grandmother used to make a homemade vanilla ice cream that was so rich and creamy and good! I always loved visiting Karen because her grandmother would give us girls a scoop of this luscious stuff in a cone to take outside while we played. I remember she made it right in the freezer of her refrigerator – no ice cream maker for her! Since becoming an adult, I have looked for an ice cream recipe that did NOT require an ice cream maker but have had no luck so far.

As it happened, she did manage to put her hand to the original recipe that very same day, and her friend Karen and sent it on. It goes like this:

Grandma Reese’s Ice Cream

1 quart whole milk
1 pint fresh cream, whipped
2 cups sugar
juice of 2 lemons
whites of 2 eggs, whipped

I think maybe Grandma poured it into flat ice-cube trays (the metal ones, about 1″ high, but without the dividers in them), put them into the freezer, and took them out a few times while it was freezing to stir the ice cream.

So, how does it all work? Well, when you consider all the critical components of ice cream as I’ve described them over the last day or so, they’re all here: water, sugar, fat and air — only instead of beating the air in with an ice cream machine agitator, it’s done ahead of time by whipping the cream and egg whites. Very, very clever indeed. Most machine-free ice cream recipes (and there are more than a few) keep the mix fluid by adding huge amounts of emulsifiers in the form of egg yolks (about 8 for a recipe this size). The results are good but heavy, heavy, heavy. I can’t wait to try this! Thank you Sally!