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Peach Ice Cream
One quart of milk, one can of condensed milk, one pint of sugar, juice of two lemons, one tablespoon of flour, three eggs and six large peaches. Make a custard of the milk, eggs, sugar and flour; when cold stir in the condensed milk and freeze. When half frozen add the lemon juice and peaches (crushed).
— Mrs. Elmer P. Miller
A church-supper ice cream built around a hand-crank freezer and a can of condensed milk. The proportions are generous and the sequence of additions matters more than it looks.
- The hinge: add the lemon juice lateThe recipe holds the lemon back until the mix is half frozen. Acid stirred into a dairy base can throw grainy flecks, and by the half-frozen stage the mix is thick and partly set; whether that was the reason the receipt orders it this way is not stated.
- Condensed milk means sweetenedIn this period "condensed milk" is the sweetened canned product, roughly a 14 oz can today. Evaporated milk is not a substitute here; it carries none of the sugar the recipe is counting on.
- A pint of sugarMeasured by volume, that is 2 cups, on top of the sugar already in the can. Modern palates usually find this cloying, and sugar depresses the freezing point, so a heavily sweetened base stays soft. Cutting to a cup or so is reasonable if you accept a firmer, icier set.
- Cook the custard properlyMilk, eggs, sugar and flour go over gentle heat, stirred, until it coats a spoon and the flour taste is gone. The tablespoon of flour is a stabiliser, not a thickener for its own sake. Chill it thoroughly — overnight is better than "when cold".
- FreezingWritten for a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, about one part salt to six or eight of ice. In a modern machine, churn the chilled base, then add lemon juice and crushed peaches once it has taken on body, and ripen in the freezer for a few hours.
- The peachesCrushed, not pureed, and left raw. Freestone peaches at full ripeness are what this wants; underripe fruit gives you hard, flavourless chips of ice. Tossing them with a little of the sugar first draws out juice and keeps them from freezing solid.
- YieldA quart of milk plus a can and the fruit gives something over two quarts of base, nearer three once churned — enough for twelve to sixteen servings.
Sweetened condensed milk turns up constantly in American community cookbooks from the 1880s onward, and this receipt shows why: it kept on a pantry shelf, it made a custard richer without more eggs or cream, and it carried its own sugar. The result was ice cream that a household could produce without a daily delivery of cream. Peach ice cream itself is often said to be among the older American frozen desserts: peaches were briefly in season, impossible to keep, and ice cream was the obvious way to use a glut. The contributor's name attached to the recipe is the signature of the genre; such sections were a roll call of local cooks as much as a set of instructions.