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Crushed Strawberry Ice Cream
To three pints of sweet cream, twelve ounces pulverized sugar, twe whole eggs, one spoonful vanilla. Mix, place over the fire, stirring constantly until it reaches a boil; remove from the fire, strain, and pass it through a hair sieve into the freezer. Crush to a pulp one quart of ripe strawberries, with six ounces pulverized sugar. Mix this pulp well with the frozen cream, and give the freezer a few more turns to harden. Very fine.
A cooked custard base churned plain, with sweetened crushed berries folded in at the end. The method is sound; most of what needs translating is vocabulary and equipment.
- The hinge: fold the fruit in coldThe berries go into cream that is already frozen, not into the hot custard. The sugar crushed into the pulp lowers its freezing point, so the fruit is less likely to set into hard red shards.
- "Twe whole eggs"Almost certainly a misprint for two. Two whole eggs to three pints of cream is a very lean custard by modern standards, closer to a thickened cream than a French-style base.
- Bringing custard to a boilAn egg custard curdles well below boiling; current practice is to cook to about 175-180F, when it coats a spoon. The recipe strains twice, which will catch anything that does set.
- Hair sieveA sieve woven from horsehair, the fine strainer of its day. A fine-mesh conical strainer or a chinois does the same work.
- Pulverized sugarFinely ground granulated sugar, equivalent to today's superfine or caster sugar. It is not modern powdered sugar, which contains cornstarch. Twelve ounces is about 1 3/4 cups, the six ounces about 7/8 cup.
- "One spoonful vanilla"Genuinely ambiguous. In a book of this date it most likely means a tablespoon of vanilla extract, but a teaspoon would not be out of character for the period; taste the custard before straining.
- The freezerA hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt. "A few more turns to harden" assumes the salt-ice bath is still cold and working; with an electric machine, fold the fruit in at the soft-serve stage and transfer to the freezer for a few hours.
- YieldThree pints of cream plus a quart of fruit gives roughly two and a half quarts, enough for twelve or more servings.
Strawberry was among the flavors that anchored American ice cream well before commercial manufacture, alongside vanilla and lemon, and it appears in household books from the mid-nineteenth century onward as a June recipe -- made when berries were briefly cheap and abundant and the icehouse still held winter ice. The technique here, churning a plain custard and only then working in crushed sweetened fruit, appears in period manuals on the grounds that fruit acid and water interfere with a smooth freeze. The hand-crank freezer that the recipe assumes, an inner canister turned inside a bucket of ice and rock salt, is generally credited to Nancy Johnson's design of the 1840s, and by the time this book was compiled it was ordinary kitchen equipment rather than a luxury.