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Apricot Ice Cream
Cut in halves and stone one and a half dozen of ripe apricots; take the meats out of the stones; blanch them in hot water and put them with the apricots into a porcelain pan, with one pound of white sugar and one glass of water; let the whole boil to a soft pulp; rub through a sieve and let stand until wanted. When ready for freezing, add gradually to the apricots one quart of the best sweet cream. Mix thoroughly and freeze. Clear the sides often and continue freezing until the cream assumes a stiff, smooth mellow substance.
The frozen-cream part of this is unremarkable, but the recipe deliberately cooks the apricot kernels into the base, and that is what rules it out.
- The "meats out of the stones"Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed, chewed or digested. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous, and it is the reason apricot kernels are restricted or carry warnings in many countries today.
- The quantity is well past any safe rangeEighteen apricots yields eighteen kernels, all of them blanched, boiled to a pulp and sieved into a quart of cream. European food-safety assessments put the tolerable amount for an adult at roughly the equivalent of a very small number of kernels; eighteen kernels shared among a few servings of ice cream is not in that neighbourhood, even allowing for the wide variation in amygdalin content between varieties.
- Blanching does not fix itA brief dip in hot water loosens the skins; it cannot be relied on to remove amygdalin, and crushing and sieving the softened kernels is the mechanical damage by which cyanide is released. The subsequent boiling will destroy some of the amygdalin, but not dependably. Kernels appear in period confectionery as a cheaper stand-in for bitter almond flavouring.
- Not an ordinary kitchen hazardThis is not hot sugar or raw egg. If you want apricot ice cream, use a current recipe that flavours the fruit with vanilla, almond extract or a little liqueur and discards the stones whole.
- On the rest of the wording, for referenceA "porcelain pan" means an enamelled or otherwise non-reactive pan, chosen because acidic fruit attacks bare iron and copper. A "glass of water" is vague, probably somewhere between half a cup and a cup. The recipe does not name the apparatus, but "clear the sides often" points to freezing in a canister set in ice and salt, with the frozen film scraped from the walls.
Fruit ices and cream ices were a showpiece of the American dessert course in this period, and cookbooks of the time often grouped them in their own chapter because the equipment was distinctive: a pail of ice and coarse salt, an inner canister, a crank and a paddle. Apricots came to the table as a summer market fruit or dried, and the use of the kernel had a flavour rationale — the kernel of the apricot, like that of the peach and the bitter almond, carries the benzaldehyde note that reads as "almond," so a cook without bitter almonds or ratafia essence could crack the stones instead. The practice appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confectionery in Britain, France and America. That bitter almonds and related kernels could yield prussic acid was known to chemists from the early nineteenth century, but the caution was slow to reach domestic manuals.