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Frozen Apricots
Drain the apricots from the liquor in the can. Reserve liquor and cut fruit in one-fourth inch cubes. To the syrup add sufficient water to make four cups; add one cup orange juice; add one and onehalf cups sugar. Cook five minutes, strain and pour over apricots; chill and freeze. Fresh apricots or peaches may be used when in season. The fresh fruit should be cooked until clear, in a syrup made of four cups of water and two cups sugar. When this mixture is frozen to a mush, two cups of Whipped Cream may be added, if one desires a richer dessert.
This is a fruit ice, not a custard, and the whole thing hinges on how it is frozen. The original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt; without churning of some kind you will get a solid block.
- "Freeze" means churnPour the chilled mixture into an ice cream machine and run it until it is the consistency of thick slush, about 20-25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break it up thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes for three to four hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- "Frozen to a mush"That is the point where the mixture holds a soft mound on a spoon but is still pourable at the edges. It is the easiest stage at which to fold the whipped cream in evenly; once the ice is firm it will streak.
- Canned apricots have changedA can of this date would usually have been packed in heavy syrup. Fruit packed in juice or light syrup carries far less sugar, so taste the finished liquid before freezing and add sugar until it is distinctly sweeter than you want the frozen result to be; freezing mutes sweetness noticeably.
- Quantity of fruitThe recipe never names a can size. Two standard 15-oz cans, drained, give roughly two cups of quarter-inch cubes, which is a sensible ratio to the five cups of liquid.
- Cut the cubes small and keep them smallQuarter-inch dice is not fussiness. Larger pieces of fruit freeze into hard nuggets that do not soften in the mouth the way the surrounding ice does.
- Fresh fruit variationHalve and peel the apricots or peaches and poach them in the 4:2 water-and-sugar syrup only until translucent, five to ten minutes depending on ripeness. Cook them past that and they collapse into jam.
- The creamUse unsweetened cream whipped to soft peaks, not stiff. Stiff cream fights the ice and leaves streaks; two cups turns this from a sharp fruit ice into something close to a modern sherbet.
- Yield and servingSomething over seven cups before the cream, given five cups of liquid, the dissolved sugar and about two cups of fruit; more again once two cups of whipped cream go in. Let it stand a few minutes out of the freezer before scooping; a sugar-and-juice ice sets harder than a dairy one.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a run of American menu books published in the years before the First World War, when the Sunday dinner was a fixed sequence of courses and a frozen dish was expected to close it. That this one leads with a can rather than a basket of fruit is the period detail worth noticing: California canneries were turning out apricots in large quantity by the 1900s, and the reserved syrup is treated here as an ingredient in its own right rather than something to pour away, which is why the recipe builds the ice around it and mentions fresh fruit only "when in season." The optional whipped cream folded in at the mush stage moves the dish away from a plain water ice towards the richer frozen desserts of the period.