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Peach Ice Cream No. 1
1½ cups peach pulp. 1½ cups granulated sugar.
Juice one lemon. 1 quart thin cream.
PROCESS: Pare and stone choice, ripe peaches and rub the pulp through a purée strainer; add sugar and lemon juice, turn into the can of freezer packed in ice and salt (using three measures of crushed ice to one of rock salt); add cream and freeze in the usual way.
A raw-fruit ice cream with no custard base, which means the flavor stands or falls on the peaches. The mixture is nothing but fruit, sugar, lemon and cream, so use fruit that is fully ripe and fragrant.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" in American books of this period is roughly what is now sold as light cream, about 18 to 20 percent butterfat. A quart of half heavy cream and half whole milk comes close; all heavy cream will churn buttery in a modern machine.
- How many peaches1½ cups of strained pulp takes roughly 3 or 4 medium freestone peaches, on the order of a pound before paring and stoning. Push them through a sieve rather than pureeing in a blender.
- The sugar is not a misprintBoth quantities read 1½ cups, and the sugar is doing double duty: sweetening and keeping the ice cream from freezing rock solid. Cutting it much below a cup gives a hard, icy result in a home freezer.
- Dissolve before freezingStir the sugar into the pulp and lemon juice and let it stand until no grit remains, twenty minutes or so. Undissolved sugar in a raw-fruit mixture leaves the finished cream sandy.
- Lemon juiceIt sharpens the flavor, and it also helps keep the pale pulp from browning while you work; the recipe has you add it with the sugar, as soon as the fruit is strained.
- Ice and saltThree measures crushed ice to one of rock salt is the standard packing for a hand-crank or electric bucket freezer, and it is still correct. With a modern canister machine, ignore this and freeze the canister solid for 24 hours first.
- Chill the mixture first"Freeze in the usual way" assumes the whole mix goes into the can cold. Refrigerate it to about 40F before churning; a warm mix churns long, melts the ice and comes out coarse.
- Yield and ripeningMakes roughly two quarts once churned. Fresh from the churn it is soft; pack it down, cover, and let it harden in the freezer two to three hours before serving.
52 Sunday Dinners treats this as a summer dish, for the obvious reason: peach ice cream was a seasonal event, tied to the few weeks when local freestones came in ripe enough to sieve raw. The recipe belongs to the older Philadelphia style of ice cream, made with nothing but cream, sugar and fruit and no cooked custard, as opposed to the egg-thickened French style; American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly give both. The instruction to pack the freezer with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt belongs to the era of block ice and the hand-crank freezer. That this appears as "No. 1" suggests a second version followed.