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Fruit Ice Cream (Procure well ripened fruit)
Procure well ripened fruit; when well picked put into an earthen bowl; mash the fruit with a wooden spoon, pass it through a hair sieve, sweeten to taste, and to one pint of fruit juice allow the same of sweet fresh cream, well whipped. Mix the cream and juice, beating again for three or four minutes. Freeze and serve.
In sweetening the cream, put a teacup of sugar to each quart. Add the juice gradually, stirring carefully. Froth and freeze.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream in the old sense: no eggs, no cooked custard, just fruit juice, cream and sugar. The instructions are doubled and slightly contradictory, which tells you the compiler pasted two versions of the same method together; either reading works.
- The hinge: add the juice to the cream, slowlyFruit juice is acidic and cream can curdle on contact with it. The recipe's second pass has you add the juice to the sweetened cream gradually, stirring; doing it in that order, rather than tipping cream into juice, reduces the risk of the mixture separating before it reaches the freezer.
- A hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, standard fine-straining equipment of the period; being non-metallic it also would not react with acidic fruit. A fine-mesh nylon or stainless strainer does the same job; press with the back of a ladle rather than forcing pulp through.
- Earthen bowlGlass, stainless or ceramic. Mashing berries in aluminium or unlined copper gives a metallic taste and dulls the colour.
- A teacup of sugarUsually read as about 3/4 cup per quart of cream, though period teacups varied and some readings are as small as 1/2 cup; either way it is on the modest side for a frozen mixture. Sugar tastes weaker cold, so judge the mix sweeter than you want the finished ice cream; taste after the juice goes in, since fruit varies enormously.
- ProportionsOne pint juice to one pint cream, whipped. That is a lot of water relative to fat, so expect a light, slightly icy result rather than a dense modern ice cream.
- "Freeze"The book assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, which churns as it chills. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn as usual. Do not simply put the bowl in the freezer unless you are prepared to beat it every 30 minutes.
- Whipping, then churningWhipped cream loses most of its air in the churn, so it is not worth taking the cream to stiff peaks. Soft, thickened cream is enough; the point is a smooth emulsion, not volume.
- Yield and servingA quart of liquid makes about 1 1/2 quarts churned, serving six to eight. With no egg yolk or stabiliser it hardens rock-solid overnight, so serve it the day it is made, straight from the churn if possible.
Fruit ice creams of this kind — cream, sugar, fruit, nothing else — were the American standard through the nineteenth century and are still called Philadelphia-style to distinguish them from the egg-thickened French custard base. What made them a household rather than a confectioner's dish was the crank freezer with its inner can and paddle, generally traced to a patent granted to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s and manufactured in enormous numbers thereafter; combined with the commercial ice trade, it put ice cream within reach of any kitchen that could buy a block of ice and a bag of rock salt. That is why a compilation like this one can assume the reader owns the equipment, and why the recipe says only "freeze and serve" without explaining how. The instruction to use well-ripened fruit is doing real work: with no flavouring, no colouring and no cooking, the finished ice cream tastes of exactly as much fruit as went in.