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Peach Cream Ice
Divide twelve ripe peaches into halves, blanch the kernels, and put them, with the fruit, into a stewpan, with a syrup, made by boiling in half a pint of water six ounces of loaf sugar until it is dissolved. Stir the contents of the saucepan over the fire until the fruit is reduced to pulp, then press it through a hair sieve into a basin. Add three-quarters of an ounce of gelatine, dissolved in half a pint of water, a pint of whipped cream, and three or four drops of prepared cochineal. Put the cream into an ice-mould that has a cover, and when it begins to thicken stir it well. When it is quite thick put on the cover, and spread some butter over the opening, so that no water may get through it. Let the ice and saltpetre be at least three inches thick around the mould. When quite firm the peach ice is ready for serving, but should remain till wanted. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. per pint, with peaches 2d. each. Sufficient for nearly three pints of ice.
The failure point here is not the freezing method but the first line. Everything else in the recipe is a conventional Victorian cream ice, but the kernels put it outside what should be eaten today.
- The peach kernelsThe seed inside a peach stone contains amygdalin, the same cyanogenic glycoside that makes bitter almonds dangerous; chewing, crushing or steeping it releases hydrogen cyanide. Twelve blanched kernels stewed into the pulp is a real dose, and the risk falls hardest on children eating a sweet iced dish. Modern food authorities advise against eating peach and apricot kernels at all.
- Why the kernels were thereThey were the flavouring, not an afterthought — that faint almond note in old peach and apricot ices comes from the same compound family that makes them hazardous. Leaving them out changes the dish rather than merely trimming it, which is one reason to work from a current peach ice cream recipe instead.
- CochinealThe three or four drops of "prepared cochineal" are a red colouring made from dried scale insects, still permitted as carmine but a known allergen and not vegetarian. Bottled colourings of the period were a common target of adulteration, though how far prepared cochineal was affected is not well recorded.
- Saltpetre in the freezing packPotassium nitrate was used with ice as a cooling mixture because dissolving it drops the temperature. It never touches the ice cream, and plain rock salt does the same job.
- The archaic measures, for reading purposesA half pint here is an imperial half pint, ten fluid ounces, about a cup and a quarter US. Loaf sugar is refined white sugar broken from a cone; a hair sieve is a fine horsehair-mesh strainer, the equivalent of a fine chinois. The costing of 2s. 6d. per pint is the retail-price note Cassell's attached to almost every entry.
- YieldThe original claims nearly three pints, about a dozen modern half-cup servings, or six to eight generous ones.
Cream ices were a fixture of the well-off Victorian table by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s and 80s, made in a covered pewter or copper mould buried in a pail of pounded ice and salt — the sealed lid and the smear of butter over the joint exist to keep brine out of the ice, as the recipe itself says, a detail that vanishes the moment domestic freezers arrive. Flavouring stone fruit with its own kernel was common across European confectionery, and the same idea underlies noyau, ratafia and crème de noyaux; the almond taste of a nineteenth-century peach or apricot ice often came from the pit rather than from almonds. Cochineal, imported from Mexico and the Canaries and sold to households ready-prepared in a bottle, was an ordinary way to tint a pale fruit cream to the pink that cooks felt a peach ought to be, and it appears throughout the book wherever a dish is thought to look insufficiently like itself.