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Frozen Peaches
Mix well together two quarts of fresh, rich milk, two teacupfuls of good sugar; put it into the freezer with ice and salt packed closely around it. When the milk is very cold, stir into it one quart of peaches, mashed and sweetened; mix together well and freeze.
This is a Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just milk, sugar and fruit churned in an ice-and-salt freezer. A few things need translating before it works in a modern machine.
- The "freezer"In a book of this period this means a hand-crank churn — a metal canister with a dasher, set in a wooden bucket and packed with crushed ice and coarse salt; the usual proportions run somewhere between about eight and three parts ice to one of rock salt, the saltier mix freezing faster. Any modern ice cream maker substitutes directly; the canister-in-the-freezer type needs to be frozen solid at least 24 hours first.
- TeacupfulA teacup in these books is smaller than a modern measuring cup — usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so two teacupfuls is somewhere around 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sugar for two quarts of milk. Note the peaches are sweetened separately on top of that.
- Add the fruit cold, and latePeach juice is acidic enough to risk curdling plain milk, and the original has the base already "very cold" in the freezer before the fruit goes in. Chill the milk and sugar thoroughly, and fold in the fruit only once the base is at or below refrigerator temperature.
- Milk alone freezes hard and icyMilk with no added cream and no egg yolk gives a coarse, granular product closer to a sherbet, though the original's "rich" milk would have been unskimmed and fattier than modern whole milk. Replacing a pint of the milk with heavy cream, or adding a couple of tablespoons of corn syrup, produces the smoother texture most people now want from "ice cream."
- The peachesOne quart of mashed peaches is about 2 lb of ripe fruit, peeled and pitted. Toss them with sugar and let them sit half an hour before mashing; sugared fruit freezes softer and will not set into gravel in the finished ice cream.
- Volume and batchingThree quarts of mixture will overflow almost every domestic machine. Split it into two or three batches — most home churns take 1 to 1 1/2 quarts of liquid and need headroom for expansion.
- Yield and servingThree quarts of mix, rather more once churned, giving 12 to 14 servings. It is best straight from the churn; after a night in a modern freezer at 0F it will be very firm and wants 15 minutes on the counter.
Ice cream made without eggs — milk or cream, sugar and flavouring, frozen and churned — came to be called Philadelphia-style in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, distinguishing it from the cooked custard bases favoured in French practice. Recipes like this one belong to the era of the hand-crank freezer, patented in various forms from the 1840s onward, which took ice cream out of the confectioner's shop and into the domestic kitchen; by 1900 commercial ice harvesting and delivery meant an ordinary household could get a block of ice and a bag of rock salt without much trouble. Peaches were the obvious summer candidate: cheap and abundant in season, impossible to keep, and sweet enough to carry a plain milk base.