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Frozen Peaches
Pare and divide large, fresh, ripe and juicy peaches, sprinkle over them granulated sugar, freeze them like ice-cream for an hour; remove them just before serving, and sprinkle with a little more sugar. Canned peaches and all kinds of berries may be prepared in the same way. -Mrs. A. G. Wilcox, Minneapolis, Minn. To KEEP PINE-APPLES.
Pare and cut out the eyes of a ripe pine-apple, strip all the pulp from the core with a silver fork; to a pint of this add a pound of granulated sugar, stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved, put in glass fruit-cans, and turn down the covers as closely as possible. This will keep a long time.
Two short entries run together here: a still-frozen peach dessert and a cold-pack method for keeping pineapple. The first translates directly to a modern freezer; the second belongs to an era before anyone measured spoilage.
- "Freeze them like ice-cream""Freeze them like ice-cream" most likely means packing the fruit into the can of a hand-crank freezer surrounded by ice and salt; the recipe does not say whether it was churned, and pared halves suggest it was not. In a modern kitchen, spread the sugared peaches in a shallow metal pan and put them in the freezer, raking with a fork every 20 minutes or so for about an hour. The result is closer to a coarse granita than a sorbet.
- Serve the moment it comes outPeaches are mostly water and freeze rock-hard if left overnight. The hour is the point: the fruit should be crystalline at the edges and still yielding at the centre. Held longer, it needs 10 to 15 minutes on the counter before it can be spooned.
- How much sugarNo quantity is given. Figure roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar per pound of pared fruit, tossed and left 15 minutes to draw juice before freezing, with a further sprinkle at the table as directed. Sugar also keeps the ice crystals from setting into a solid block.
- BrowningCut peaches oxidise fast. A tablespoon of lemon juice tossed with the fruit costs nothing and keeps the colour without reading as lemon.
- Canned peachesDrain them well before freezing, and cut the added sugar to almost nothing, since commercial syrup is already sweet. Heavy syrup freezes soft and slushy rather than crisp.
- The silver forkIn the pineapple entry this is not affectation. Nineteenth-century steel and iron forks reacted with acid fruit and darkened it; stainless steel, which came later, does not, so any fork will do.
- BromelainRaw pineapple contains an enzyme that breaks down protein, which is why fresh pineapple will not set gelatine and why eating much of it raw makes the mouth tingle. It is inactivated by cooking, and this uncooked preserve leaves it active.
- The pineapple keeping methodCold-packing raw fruit in sugar and screwing down a lid is not preserving by any current standard: nothing is heated, nothing is sealed under vacuum, and "a long time" is doing a great deal of work. The sugar ratio is high and pineapple is acidic, so the likely outcome is fermentation or surface mould rather than anything worse, but treat it as a refrigerator preserve to be eaten within a week or two, and use a tested modern recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- YieldNo yield is given; six large peaches, pared and halved, would make about four modest servings of the frozen dish.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Minneapolis and first issued in the late 1870s, and its contributor list reads like a directory of Midwestern churchwomen sending in what they actually made; Mrs. A. G. Wilcox shares a surname with Estelle Woods Wilcox, whose name is attached to the book's compilation. That a household in Minnesota could freeze peaches at all says something about the period: the commercial ice trade and cheap hand-crank freezers had put ice-and-salt freezing within reach of ordinary kitchens by the 1870s, and cookbooks of the decade are full of frozen fruits, frozen custards and water ices that would have been confectioners' work a generation earlier. The pineapple entry belongs to the same moment from the other direction, when tropical fruit arrived by rail in short, glorious bursts and every household hint about "keeping" it was an attempt to stretch a season that lasted days.