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Peach Ice Cream
Make the cream as for "vanilla ice-cream." Procure nice soft peaches and chop in small pieces; sweeten to taste, mix with your cream, and freez.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's vanilla base in hand. The peaches are the whole problem: fruit is mostly water, and water freezes hard.
- The hinge: sugar the peaches separatelyChop the peaches, toss them with a tablespoon or two of sugar, and let them sit 20-30 minutes before they meet the cream. The sugar draws out juice and depresses the freezing point, so the fruit stays chewable instead of turning into gravel in the finished ice cream.
- Add the fruit lateStir the peaches in during the last few minutes of churning rather than at the start. Early addition dilutes the base with fruit juice and gives a coarse, icy texture.
- "Freez" means a crank freezerThe original names no equipment, but a book of this date would most likely have meant a wooden bucket with an inner canister, packed with crushed ice and coarse rock salt; period directions vary, commonly somewhere between three and eight parts ice to one of salt. A modern machine does the same job; churn 20-25 minutes, then firm up 2-3 hours in the freezer.
- The vanilla base it refers toNineteenth- and early twentieth-century "vanilla ice-cream" in books of this kind is usually either a cooked custard (milk, sugar, eggs, thickened over heat, then cream and vanilla) or a plain uncooked mixture of cream, sugar and vanilla. If your base is a custard, cook it to 170-175F and chill it thoroughly before the peaches go in.
- "Sweeten to taste" needs a numberThe recipe gives no quantity for fruit or sugar. If you work with about 2 lb of ripe peaches, 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar is a reasonable starting point, bearing in mind the base itself is already sweet. Taste the combined mixture cold: freezing mutes sweetness noticeably, so it should read slightly sweeter than you want the final result.
- Peach quality does the work"Nice soft peaches" is the actual specification. Freestones at full ripeness, peeled; underripe supermarket fruit gives almost no flavor once frozen and is worth mashing with a little lemon juice to wake it up.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. If you start from a quart of base and add 2 lb of fruit you will finish with well over a quart and a half, enough for eight or so servings.
Peaches were an obvious candidate for ice cream in nineteenth-century America: abundant, cheap in season, and impossible to keep. Ice cream was one of the few ways a household could use a bushel of soft, bruise-prone fruit before it spoiled. The terseness of this entry is characteristic of turn-of-the-century compilations: the vanilla recipe carries the technique, and the fruit variations are set down in a line or two, on the assumption that the reader has already worked through the section from the top. The hand-crank freezer that made these recipes practical in ordinary kitchens dates to the mid-1800s, and by 1900 commercial ice delivery meant a summer freezing could be done on a back porch rather than requiring an estate icehouse.