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Pine-Apple Ice-Cream
Three pints cream, two large ripe pine-apples, two pounds powdered sugar; slice the pine-apples thin, scatter the sugar between the slices, cover and let the fruit stand three hours, cut or chop it up in the syrup, and strain through a hair-sieve or double bag of coarse lace; beat gradually into the cream, and freeze as rapidly as possible; reserve a few pieces of pine-apple unsugared, cut into square bits, and stir through cream when half frozen, first a pint of well-whipped cream, and then the fruit. Peach ice-cream may be made in the same way. -Mrs. L. M. T., New York City.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooking, just cream, fruit and sugar — from the era of the hand-cranked bucket freezer. Most of the work is maceration, and the only real technique is getting it frozen fast.
- The hinge: freeze it hard and fastPineapple juice is acidic and thin, and it will thin the cream and throw ice crystals if the mixture sits around. Chill the strained fruit syrup and the cream separately to refrigerator temperature or below, combine, and get it into the machine immediately.
- Scale and yieldThree pints of cream plus two pineapples and their syrup makes roughly a gallon of finished ice cream — more than most domestic machines hold. Halving or quartering is sensible; a quarter batch is about a quart.
- The sugar is very highTwo pounds is about four and a half cups for three pints of cream. Pineapples shipped unripe were likely sharper than the fruit sold today, and heavy sugar also helped keep the mixture soft in a salt-and-ice freezer. Modern fruit and a modern churn can take a third less; much below about a cup of sugar per quart of base, though, it tends to set very hard.
- Hair-sieve and lace bagBoth mean a fine strainer. A regular fine-mesh sieve works, and pressing the pulp firmly gets the juice without the fibre. Do not push the woody core through.
- Ambiguous creamThe recipe calls for three pints of cream at the start, then a pint of well-whipped cream when the mixture is half frozen. It is not clear whether that pint is part of the three or additional. Reading it as part of the three is the safer interpretation; folding in an extra pint of whipped cream will lighten the texture considerably.
- The reserved fruitUnsugared raw pineapple freezes into hard shards. Cut the reserved pieces small — a quarter inch — and add them in the last minute of churning, or toss them with a spoonful of the syrup first so they stay yielding.
- Freezing without a machineThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, cranked by hand. In a modern ice cream maker, churn as directed by the manufacturer, then ripen in the freezer two to three hours before serving.
- Peach versionThe same method with peaches needs the fruit peeled and stoned; unlike pineapple, peaches brown, so work quickly and add a squeeze of lemon to the macerating sugar.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) collected recipes from named contributors across the country, and the initials and city here — Mrs. L. M. T., New York City — mark this as an urban recipe. Pineapple in an American home kitchen in the 1870s usually meant fresh fruit brought up by schooner and steamship from Cuba and the Bahamas, expensive and seasonal, which is why the recipe begins with slicing whole fruit and drawing its own syrup with sugar. The style — sweetened fruit beaten into plain cream and frozen, with no custard base — is what came to be called Philadelphia ice cream, and it was a common American method alongside the egg-rich French style. The instruction to freeze "as rapidly as possible" reflects the practical limit of the day: the hand-cranked bucket freezer, in use since the middle of the century and by the 1870s common enough in middle-class households that a cookbook could assume one without explanation.