To make ice cream you need sugar, milk, cream, eggs and flavoring.  You also need something to make the ice cream in.  Of course you could buy ice cream in the store, but it was expensive, and if you had to go very far it would melt.  Besides, it does not taste as good as home made.

My Bilbrey grandparents lived on a farm and in addition to the crops they planted they also had cows, chickens, hogs and mules.

The cows had to be milked twice a day, every day, including Sunday.  This would be done by hand.  There were no milking machines, but even had there been, they would have been worthless because the farm had no electricity until I was 9 or 10 or 11 years old.  Some of the milk would be drunk.  Some of the milk was also made into butter or cream. 

The milk, which would be used for butter or cream, would be poured into a hand cranked machine with two spouts.  This machine was called a separator.  You would turn the hand crank and butter fat or cream from the milk would come out one spout and cream from the other. It was called a separator because it would separate the cream from the milk.

Sometimes my parents, my brother and I would go out to the farm on a summer evening, usually Saturday after my father finished working.  My uncle J. D. (my mother’s brother) with his wife, Beatrice, and his two sons, Jerry Dean and Curtis and daughter, Sybil Maxine, would also be there.  Other times my mother’s brother, Otis, would be there with his wife Zola and daughter, Wanda.  My two uncles, J. D. and Otis, also farmed nearby my Bilbrey grandparents.  Other times, my mother’s sister, Leota, who lived about 80 miles away, would be there with her husband Frank Shaw and children, Frank Jr. and Barbara.  My mother’s “sister,”  Hermalea, who was born in 1928, was always there.  Sometimes, all would be there.

Now to get back to the ice cream.  To make homemade ice cream you need something to make it with.  There were things called ice cream makers.  An ice cream maker had a metal can with a hole in the top.  A paddle called a dasher was in the metal can and came up through the hole in the top.  The ice cream mix was placed in the metal can.  The metal can was then placed in a wooden bucket.  Across the top of the wooden bucket was a device with a gear box and a handle.  The top of the dasher was placed in the gear box so that as you turned the crank the gear would turn the dasher in the metal can.   In the wooden bucket between the sides of the bucket and the metal can ice was placed.  Rock salt was placed on the ice and then the crank was turned.  The wooden bucket had a little hole on the side near the bottom so that as the ice melted the brine would run out.

Where did the ice come from?  As we left our home in town to go to the farm my Dad would go by the icehouse and buy a block of ice.  When it came time to make ice cream ice picks were used to break the ice blocks into little pieces that would fit in the wooden ice cream maker wooden bucket.

Now about the ice cream mix.  Each person had their favorite recipe.  Basically the mix included milk, cream, eggs, sugar and flavoring.  Vanilla was usually the favorite flavor.  Sometimes nuts were added.  Other times fresh fruit such as peaches.  I don’t recall ever seeing fresh strawberries as I was growing up.  Some people cooked the mix before poring it into the metal can, but most did not.

When you first started making the ice cream turning the handle on the crank was very easy and sometimes we kids would do it.  As the handle was turned, some of the ice melted, so ice had to be added from time to time.  You had to make sure that the melted ice did not reach the top of the metal can or the salt brine would get inside and ruin the ice cream.  Later as the mix froze the handle became harder and harder to turn and the men would do it.

After the crank became very, very hard to turn you knew that the mix had become ice cream.  Burlap bags we called them tow sacks) would be folded on the top of the gear box for about 30 minutes or an hour so the ice cream would “ripen.”

The metal can would be removed from the wooden bucket and the ice cream scoped out.  It seemed that the ice cream that stuck to the dasher always tasted the best so we kids always vied to see who would be privileged to eat from the dasher or lick it.

As I said, there is nothing better than home made ice cream on a hot summer’s evening.