I love New York and I love ice cream. Naturally, when I saw a recipe for New York Ice Cream in The Pillsbury Cook-Book from 1904, I knew I had to make it. I usually refrain from making ice cream from vintage and antique recipes (with some exceptions) because ice cream science has come such a long way but this recipe seemed like it would be right on par with modern ones. It calls for seven egg yolks for the custard, which I know from making modern ice cream gives very smooth, creamy, and scoopable results.
The recipe also uses gelatin to stabilize the mixture, something we rarely do these days in favor of ingredients like cornstarch, gums, and other commercial stabilizers. I am in a very large ice cream making group on Facebook and one time someone mentioned a recipe that used gelatin. Going by the reaction of people in group you’d be forgiven for thinking they had been asked to put motor oil in the recipe. But gelatin does do a good job of stabilizing dairy mixtures like this one. This is something that unflavored gelatin brand Knox tried to capitalize on in the heyday of gelatin.