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APRICOT ICE CREAM (another way)
Rub through a fine sieve half a pound of apricot jam with a pint of cream, the strained juice of a lemon, half a dozen bitter almonds pounded, and a glass of noyeau. Freeze twenty-five minutes. Or, take a dozen fine ripe apricots. Skin, stone, and pulp them through a sieve with a pint of hot cream and five or six ounces of the finest sifted sugar. Mould and freeze. The apricots may be scalded before they are pulped. Sufficient for six or more persons.
Two versions sit side by side here: a jam-based cream flavoured with bitter almonds and noyeau, and a plain purée of fresh apricots. The first cannot be made today, and the notes below explain why before turning to the vocabulary of the rest.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding six of them into the cream does. Nothing in this preparation heats them, and freezing does nothing to the toxin. Their retail sale for domestic use is restricted or prohibited in a number of countries, including the United States, for this reason.
- Noyeau compounds itNoyeau (noyau) is a liqueur flavoured with apricot, peach or cherry kernels, the same amygdalin-bearing material. A glass of it alongside pounded bitter almonds stacks two sources of the same compound in one pint of unheated cream. Use a current recipe if you want an almond-scented apricot ice.
- A glass, as a measure"A glass" of a liqueur in Cassell's generally means a wine glass, roughly 2 fl oz, though the book is not consistent. "A pint" is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups rather than 2.
- "Freeze twenty-five minutes"This assumes a pewter or tin freezing pot packed in ice and coarse salt and worked with a spaddle, or a hand-cranked pail churn. Twenty-five minutes of that produces a soft-frozen ice; it is a churning time, not a time in a modern freezer, where an unchurned mixture would simply set into a block.
- "Mould and freeze"In the second method the mixture is churned to a stiff cream, packed into a shaped pewter mould, and buried in ice and salt to set hard — the reason Victorian ices arrive at table as pyramids and fruit shapes rather than scooped.
- Hot cream with raw fruitThe instruction to pulp the apricots "with a pint of hot cream" is a Victorian way of loosening the fruit and dissolving the sugar. It is not a cooked custard and gives no keeping quality; scalding the apricots first, as the book allows, is mainly to slip the skins.
- Sugar"The finest sifted sugar" is a fine-grained sugar close to modern caster, which dissolves in the fruit without a syrup stage. Five or six ounces to a dozen apricots and a pint of cream is a modest quantity, and cold dulls the perception of sweetness in any case.
- YieldThe book's "six or more persons" is fair for the day, the portions being much smaller than a modern scooped serving.
Apricot ices belong to the long English tradition of the iced cream as a dessert-course conceit, made possible by the ice house and, by Cassell's day, by commercial ice imported in bulk and by the hand-cranked pail freezer that put moulded ices within reach of an ordinary middle-class kitchen. The two methods here follow the seasons: fresh apricots for the few weeks they are worth having, jam for the other eleven months. The bitter-almond-and-noyeau flavouring is a period signature.