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Apricot Ice Cream
Rub through a fine sieve 1/2 pound of apricot jam with 1 pint of cream, the strained juice of 1 lemon, half a dozen bitter almonds pounded, and 1 glass of noyau. Freeze twenty-five minutes. Or, take a dozen fine ripe apricots. Skin, stone, and pulp them through a sieve with 1 pint of hot cream, and 5 or 6 ounces of the finest sifted sugar. Mould and freeze. The apricots may be scalded before they are pulped.
Two versions of the same ice sit side by side here, and the first one turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food. The notes below explain the hazard and decode the vocabulary of a Victorian ice-cream cabinet.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what "half a dozen bitter almonds pounded" and stirred into cold cream does. Nothing in this preparation heats or otherwise drives off the released cyanide. Six kernels shared out across a pint of cream is a modest dose, and reported poisonings generally involve rather more, but their sale as food is restricted in the United States and controlled elsewhere; a current recipe should be used for almond-scented ices.
- NoyauNoyau (from the French for fruit stone) was a sweet liqueur flavoured with pounded apricot or peach kernels — the same cyanogenic material as the bitter almonds, in liquid form. Liqueurs under the name crème de noyaux are still made, though modern almond flavourings are generally built on regulated benzaldehyde rather than raw kernels.
- "1 glass"An unhelpfully elastic measure even in period usage; in ice and jelly recipes of this era it generally means a wine glass, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fluid ounces. Alcohol in any quantity also softens a frozen mixture and slows it setting.
- The second versionThe alternative given after "Or" — apricots, hot cream, sifted sugar — contains neither bitter almonds nor noyau. It is a plain fruit-and-cream ice of a common Victorian type.
- "Freeze twenty-five minutes"This is time in a pail freezer: an inner canister packed in ice and coarse salt, cranked or scraped by hand. It is not a domestic freezer instruction, and it assumes a cook working the mixture off the sides of the can throughout.
- "Mould and freeze"Moulding meant packing the churned mixture into a hinged pewter or tin mould, sealing the seam with butter or lard, and burying it in ice and salt to firm and take the shape. The moulds and the block ice both disappeared from household kitchens with mechanical refrigeration.
- "Finest sifted sugar"Caster sugar — finer than granulated, coarser than confectioners' — chosen because it dissolved in the fruit pulp without cooking. Sifting separated out the finest grains after sugar was broken down from the loaf.
- YieldA pint of cream plus fruit gives roughly a quart of finished ice, or perhaps six modest servings by the standards of a period dinner, where an ice was one of several sweets.
Apricot ice belongs to the long English tradition of "cream ices" that came into the confectioner's repertoire in the eighteenth century and reached the middle-class household in the nineteenth, once ice could be bought by the block from the ice trade. The two versions printed together tell you a good deal about how such books were assembled: one is a store-cupboard formula built on jam, lemon and liqueur, workable in any season; the other waits for ripe fruit. Kernel flavourings — bitter almonds, ratafia, noyau, peach leaves — were the standard way to give stone-fruit dishes a deeper note of the fruit itself, on the reasonable observation that the stone tastes of the fruit intensified. Their toxicity was known and occasionally fatal, and warnings appear in medical writing across the same century in which cookbooks went on calling for them by the half-dozen; food regulation caught up with the practice only in the twentieth century.