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Strawberry Ice-Cream
Sprinkle strawberries with sugar, wash well and rub through a sieve; to a pint of the juice add half a pint of good cream, make it very sweet; freeze, and when beginning to set, stir in lightly one pint of cream whipped, and lastly a handful of whole strawberries sweetened. It may then be put in a mold and imbedded in ice, or kept in the freezer; or mash with a potato-pounder in an earthen bowl one quart of strawberries with one pound of sugar; rub it through a colander, add one quart of sweet cream and freeze. Or, if not in the strawberry season, use the French bottled strawberries (or any canned ones), mix juice with half a pint of cream, sweeten and freeze; when partially set add whipped cream and strawberries.
Three variants in one paragraph: a semifreddo-style version lightened with whipped cream, a plain custardless cream ice, and a winter version from preserved fruit. The second is the one to start with.
- "Sweet cream"In 1877 this meant fresh, unsoured cream rather than sweetened cream. Use heavy or whipping cream; the pint that is to be whipped wants roughly 30 percent fat or more to hold air.
- How many berriesA pint of sieved juice takes a couple of quarts of hulled strawberries, more if they are dry. The second version's quart of berries yields roughly two cups of purée after the colander.
- "Wash well"Probably an error for "mash well": the berries have already been sugared, and washing them at that point would rinse the sugar away. Sugar them, crush them, then push through the sieve.
- "Make it very sweet"Sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable, so this is not just about flavour. The second version's ratio, one pound of sugar to a quart of fruit plus a quart of cream, works out at roughly a fifth of the mixture by weight, which is about right; under-sweetened fruit ices freeze to a brick.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. Any modern machine does the same job; churn until it holds a soft ribbon, which is the stage the recipe calls "beginning to set."
- The whipped creamFold it in, do not churn it in — the point is to keep the air. Once it goes in, the mixture will not take much more agitation, so transfer to the mould or container and harden in the freezer for three to four hours.
- Whole berriesWhole strawberries freeze hard and icy at ice-cream temperature. Halve or quarter them and let them sit in sugar first so the syrup they give up lowers their freezing point.
- Moulding"Imbedded in ice" means buried in a mixture of ice and salt to harden without churning, the old still-freezing method. A covered container in the freezer does the same thing.
- YieldEach of the first two versions makes something close to two quarts. Serve within a day or two, as fruit ices without eggs or stabiliser turn grainy quickly.
Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, when ice-cream at home meant a hand-crank freezer and a supply of ice cut from a pond the previous winter and kept in an ice-house or bought from an ice dealer — which is why the ices chapter reads as a mark of a well-provisioned household rather than an everyday dessert. Strawberries were the first fruit of the season and intensely seasonal, hence the final clause offering "French bottled strawberries" as a substitute: imported preserved fruit in glass, alongside American canned goods. The first of the three methods sweetens the purée, freezes it partway and then lightens it with whipped cream, and the recipe's shift mid-paragraph to a simple mash-and-freeze version shows the book doing what it does throughout: giving the elaborate way and the plain way in the same breath, and letting the cook choose.