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Strawberry Ice Cream
Pick the stalks off a pound of fresh, ripe, finely-flavoured strawberries, sprinkle half a pound of powdered sugar over the fruit, bruise it well with a wooden spoon, and rub it through a fine hair sieve. Mix with the juice thus obtained a pint of thick cream, the juice of a lemon, and a few drops of cochineal. Freeze and mould in the usual way. Probable cost, strawberries, 4d. to 8d. per pound.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no custard, just fruit purée, sugar and cream. It is simple enough that everything depends on the ratios and the churning.
- Imperial measuresThe pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups of heavy cream. A pound of strawberries is roughly 3 1/2 cups hulled; half a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups.
- The sugar is not optionalHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit looks extravagant, but sugar is what keeps an eggless ice cream from freezing into a solid brick. Cutting it back noticeably hardens the texture.
- Sieving the fruitMacerating the crushed berries in the sugar for half an hour before sieving draws out far more juice. A hair sieve is a fine mesh strainer; press with the back of a ladle rather than a spoon, and discard only the seeds and pulp skins.
- CochinealCochineal is a red dye made from scale insects, sold then as a liquid tincture by grocers and chemists. It is still available as carmine, though it is not vegetarian; the point is purely cosmetic, since strawberry juice in cream turns a dull salmon.
- "Thick cream"Victorian thick cream was a loose term for the richest cream to hand, broadly comparable to modern double cream. Heavy or double cream is the right substitute; single or light cream will churn thin and icy.
- The lemonOne lemon to a pint of cream is a lot of acid and it will begin to thicken the cream on contact. Mix and churn promptly rather than letting the base stand.
- "Freeze and mould in the usual way"The recipe leaves the method unspecified: at this date it could mean a freezing pot packed in ice and coarse salt and worked by hand, or one of the hand-cranked freezers then on sale. An ice cream machine does the same job; churn until thick, then firm in the freezer for three to four hours.
- Yield and keepingMakes about 1 1/2 pints, serving six. Eggless ice creams go grainy quickly, so eat it within a day or two.
Strawberry was a staple flavour of the Victorian ice trade, alongside vanilla and lemon, and it appears in Cassell's in this stripped-down eggless form, without a boiled custard base. What made the recipe printable for a middle-class household at all was ice itself: by the 1870s and 80s, blocks cut from Norwegian and North American lakes arrived in British ports in quantity, and an ice cave or freezing pot became something a well-run kitchen might actually own. The note on probable cost, four to eightpence a pound, is Cassell's usual practice and marks strawberries as a seasonal luxury with a wide price swing between the start and the height of the English season. Cochineal, imported from Central America and the Canaries, was the ordinary red colouring of the period and turns up throughout the book wherever a dish is expected to look pinker than it naturally is.