Pioneers and Ice Cream–A Combination Made in Heaven
Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
I made a batch of my grandma’s homemade ice cream last week. (Two batches, in fact—my brother and I cleaned out the first batch in a matter of hours!) Family legend says our ancestors, who fled the early boundaries of the United States hoping to find a safe place to worship their faith, walked across the plains in the late 1800’s and used a variation of this exact recipe to celebrate Brigham Young’s declaration that “this is the place”. My grandmother was born in 1903; she swore that her grandmother believed members of our family line had been making this ice cream recipe to celebrate Utah’s Pioneer Day—July 24th every summer for more than 150 years.
Makes sense to me. Most cultures and societies have traditional food that helps them keep their heritage alive. As far as I can tell, my early progenitors arrived in the West with not much more than the clothes on their backs, but those pioneer women figured out how to make shoe leather palatable in order to keep their kids from starving. While it’s memorable to read the stories of our ancestors’ sacrifices, courage, and faith, truthfully spooning a scoop of custard ice cream fresh from a hand cranked (or electric now days) freezer or licking the dasher before your brothers find out the ice cream is finished makes a powerful and deliciously tangible direct tie to the many generations which came before us.
I suspect I’ve had a bit more real-life experience with early Utah history than many Utahns. When I was pregnant with my third child, my husband took a job managing a brand-new Kentucky Fried Chicken Store in Cedar City, Utah. All by himself, he rented a house for us when the business was up and running smoothly enough for us to leave Albuquerque and join him. Listening to him talk, it was clear he was quite proud of his accomplishment. “It’s an old pioneer era house across from the historic Rock Church on Center Street,” he told me. “You’re going to love it.” When I drove up from New Mexico with our little family, I discovered he was absolutely accurate. It was an old pioneer house; so old the original owner–a polygamist–had built two separate houses for his two wives—one complete living space on the first floor and another complete family space on the second floor. Once we moved in, though the first floor had been rented out quite regularly, it became obvious no one had lived upstairs for a lot of years. The vacant rooms above us were connected to our part of the house by a staircase in the central hall. My three-year-old, Son #1, took it as a personal challenge to explore every nook and cranny of those upper rooms—which sometimes required two or three baths a day for the entire span of our lease.
The two-bedroom downstairs where we lived featured 10-foot-high ceilings and a spacious kitchen with sink and counters built for a pioneer woman at least 12 inches shorter than me. After a couple of weeks, my back had a permanent kink in it from having to bend down to wash dishes twice a day. The house was freezing in the winter and stifling in the summer, but it was on a large lot and was convenient to social events on both ends of life’s spectrum—a church across the street and the funeral home around the corner. At some point in the house’s history, the current owner—a very old man by then—had added a bathroom to the side of the house. Apparently, some years before we rented the place, the earth under the house had shifted. Since the bathroom was only an attachment and not a part of the original structure, the ground tremor had caused the floor of the bathroom to angle downward at about a 30-degree slope. My husband and I–even our two potty-trained kids–accommodated, bracing ourselves with one hand against the downhill wall when using the facility.
Not everyone was so lucky. Once when my brother and his wife came to visit, my 6’ 4” sibling climbed out of bed in the middle of the night and felt his way along the hall to use the bathroom. He didn’t bother to turn on any lights because he was afraid to wake the kids—his and ours. Turned out his yelling at the top of his lungs when he slipped off the toilet and got trapped between the toilet bowl and the downhill wall woke everybody in the neighborhood. It took both my husband and his wife to extract him. We laughed about that story for years. (But my brother? Not even once did he ever find it funny.)
We remember that old pioneer house with fondness, but it’s very age created an insidious threat that most modern families have fortunately never had to face. It was still heated by the original coal burning furnace in the basement which required two deliveries a winter of coal down a conveniently sloped shoot on the corner of the house. One afternoon mid-winter my husband made his usual trip down to downstairs to shovel coal into the stove. He didn’t come back up. An hour later I found him unconscious on the floor. Steady exposure to coal dust over the first couple of winter months had triggered his childhood asthma. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, and the next day, I searched for another rental. (We’d been living in Salt Lake for a couple of years when an old friend from Cedar called and said the owner of our “pioneer house” had sold it to the city. It’s now a museum which you can tour if you’re interested. I’d be careful of the bathroom, though.)
But in the days while we lived there, as a young wife determined not to let tradition fade away, I bought a used electric ice cream freezer at the Cedar City Deseret Industries. I don’t know how old it was, but when I plugged it in, it worked, so I bought it. My neighbors and I had a regular carpool to buy unhomogenized milk from a local dairy farmer. When it was my turn, I loaded 12 to 16 gallons of glass-bottled milk in the back of my car and delivered it to my neighbors—our own private milk route. Since the heavier cream separated itself from the more liquid milk, my fridge never lacked the ingredients for our family heritage recipe of custard ice cream. In fact, I’ve been using that same ice cream freezer to make our traditional treat since Son # 1 was three; he’s more than 50 years old now.
This time of year all over Utah we tell our children the stories of our pioneer heritage, but there’s really nothing like a bowl of freshly churned ice cream to tangibly connect them to a long line of families members who loved their kids, scraped homes together from the meager resources they craved out of the forest and rock around them, and celebrated their history with a bowl of homemade delight served fresh from the freezer as family and friends sit on the back porch watching fireworks on the 24th of July—just like Grandma did more than one hundred years ago.
(Here’s the 150-year-old family recipe if you’re interested)
Grandma’s Traditional Vanilla Custard Ice Cream
Family legend says that at least seven generations of my family have been making this ice cream to celebrate Utah’s 24th of July Pioneer Day.
1 qt. milk, heated ½ pt. whipping cream
4 eggs, separated 1 pt. half-and-half
1 ½ to 1 ¾ cups sugar 1 generous tbls. vanilla
1 can evaporated milk 1 generous tsp. lemon extract
1 tsp. salt
Beat egg yolks well, gradually adding sugar. (Will be as much sugar as you as you can beat into the yolks.) Add a little of the heated milk to the egg mixture; stir briefly, and then add all the egg and sugar mixture to the hot milk. Continue cooking, stirring until mixture comes to a boil. Stop cooking immediately and move it off the stove. Cool the mixture—in the fridge or for a couple of hours on the counter. Slightly whip egg whites with salt till frothy. Put all ingredients into freezer and freeze according to machine instructions. You may need to add a little more milk to bring mixture up to a proper mark in the freezer. Churn until soft ice cream stage. Serve.
(Warning: this recipe interferes with all diet attempts for any distance closer than 600 ft.)
Love it! And so glad you shared the recipe!
Love you and your whole family.