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Frozen Strawberries
4 cups thin cream.
Few grains salt. 3 cups thick cream. 2 cups strawberry juice and 2 cups milk. pulp. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon lemon juice.
Strawberries. 1/4 cup water.
PROCESS: Cook water and sugar together three minutes. Cool and add to cream and milk. Add a sprinkle of salt. Turn into freezer and when half frozen add lemon juice and strawberry pulp. Finish freezing. Let stand an hour or two to ripen. Serve in cone shape and place a large, unhulled strawberry in top of each cone.
The ingredient list has been mangled by the book's two-column typesetting, so read it as a single list before you start. This is a hand-cranked strawberry ice cream, and it assumes a churn packed with ice and salt.
- Untangling the ingredientsThe columns have collided. Read it as: 4 cups thin cream, 3 cups thick cream, 2 cups milk, 1 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water, 2 cups strawberry juice and pulp, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, a few grains salt, plus whole strawberries for garnish. That comes to roughly 3 quarts of base; the book gives no freezer size, so scale to the churn you have.
- Thin and thick creamThin cream is light or table cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat; thick cream is heavy cream at 36 percent or more. Substituting all heavy cream will churn to butter grains in a crank freezer, and all light cream gives a hard, icy result.
- "Turn into freezer"The freezer is the churn: an inner can surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. Fill the can no more than two-thirds full to leave room for expansion, and crank steadily rather than fast.
- When to add the fruitHolding back the strawberry pulp and lemon juice until the mixture is half frozen looks deliberate: added once the base has already thickened, the fruit's water is less likely to freeze into coarse shards, and the fresh flavour is not churned away for the whole freezing time.
- Strawberry juice and pulpMash and lightly sugar ripe berries, let them stand half an hour, then use juice and crushed flesh together to make up the 2 cups. Underripe berries give almost no color once diluted into 9 cups of dairy.
- RipeningThe hour or two of standing is not optional. Draw off the brine, repack the can in fresh ice and salt, cover with cloth or newspaper, and let the texture smooth and the flavor come forward. In a modern freezer, hold it at about 0F and let it soften a few minutes before serving.
- Serving and yieldThree quarts serves roughly twelve to sixteen. The cone shape can be formed with two large spoons dipped in hot water, or pressed in a conical mold; the unhulled berry on top is this author's finishing touch.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when a Sunday dessert meant an afternoon of cranking. Ice cream freezers with a geared dasher had been household equipment in America since the mid-nineteenth century, and by the 1910s commercially harvested and later manufactured ice made them practical in city kitchens, so a book organized month by month could put a strawberry ice on the table without apology. Northern field strawberries generally run from late May into June, and the recipe's insistence on a whole unhulled berry perched on each cone might be read as a small piece of seasonal showmanship, though that is interpretation rather than something the page states. The division of cream into "thin" and "thick" reflects a time when cream was bought or skimmed by richness rather than sold under a single label, and the distinction mattered more than it does now, since fat content was the only lever a cook had over texture in a churn with no stabilizers or emulsifiers.