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Strawberry Ice Cream
To one quart of the juice of fresh strawberries add two pounds of fine white sugar and two quarts of cream ; mix well and freeze. Raspberries, pineapple and other fruits may be made in the same manner.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooking, just fruit juice, sugar and cream. The proportions are generous and the whole thing hinges on temperature and acid.
- Scale it downAs written this is three quarts of liquid before churning, well beyond any domestic machine. A quarter of the recipe — 1 cup strawberry juice, 1/2 lb (about 1 cup) sugar, 2 cups cream — fills a standard 1.5-quart ice cream maker.
- How many berriesA quart of strained juice takes roughly 4 to 5 lb of ripe strawberries, crushed with some of the sugar and left to macerate an hour before pressing through a sieve. Straining is what keeps the texture smooth; the seeds and pulp otherwise freeze gritty.
- What "cream" meantCream of the period was generally thinner than today's heavy cream, commonly around light-cream strength (roughly 18 to 20 percent fat), though it varied by dairy. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent will churn very rich and can turn buttery; a mix of half heavy cream and half whole milk is nearer the original.
- Keep the acid cold and slowStrawberry juice is acidic enough that it can curdle cream, particularly if either is warm. Chill both thoroughly, then whisk the juice into the cream in a thin stream rather than dumping it in, and freeze at once.
- The sugar is not optionalTwo pounds to three quarts looks extravagant, but sugar is what keeps an eggless, stabiliser-free mixture from freezing into a solid block. Cutting it much below a cup per quart of finished mixture gives you a brick.
- FreezingIn a modern machine, churn 20 to 30 minutes to a soft-serve consistency, then harden in the freezer 3 to 4 hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard with a whisk every 30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- Eat it the same dayWith no egg yolk or gum to hold water, this refreezes coarse. It is at its best within a few hours of hardening and noticeably icy by the next day.
- On the substitutionsRaspberry works exactly as described, strained. Fresh pineapple juice is fine here, but note it will not set with gelatin if you try to enrich the recipe — the enzyme in raw pineapple prevents it.
- YieldThe full recipe makes roughly three quarts of mixture, enough for 20 to 24 servings; the quarter recipe gives around a quart once churned.
Uncooked ice creams of this kind — fruit, sugar and cream, frozen without a custard base — are generally called Philadelphia-style, a name American cookbooks are documented as using chiefly from the later nineteenth century, to distinguish them from the egg-thickened French sort. Their brevity in books like this one is the point: the hand-cranked freezer with its inner can, dasher and packing of cracked ice and coarse salt had by then become a familiar piece of household equipment, so a writer could say "mix well and freeze" and expect to be understood. What such a recipe really records is the state of the dairy and ice trades. Cream by the quart and ice by the block were, by most accounts, widely available in American towns, and strawberries had a short, glutted local season in which a cook might plausibly put four or five pounds of them through a sieve at once. The closing line offering raspberries and pineapple as equivalents is the standard shorthand of the period for a formula the reader was expected to treat as a method rather than a fixed dish.