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Fruit Cream
1/2 pound stewed apricots, sweetened to taste, 3 bananas, 3 oranges, 3 lemons, 3 cupfuls sugar, 3 cupfuls water. Place a sieve over a large bowl, turn in the apricots, and rub all but the skin through. Remove the seeds from the bananas, and sift the pulp. Pour the water in gradually to help the pulp go through the strainer. Squeeze the oranges and lemons, and strain into the fruit pulp. Add the sugar, and, when dissolved, freeze. 1/2 pint cream may be added before freezing, if desired. The above will make 1 gallon.
A fruit ice built entirely on sieved pulp and citrus juice, with cream as an afterthought. The work is in the straining, and the sugar is what keeps it scoopable.
- Dissolve the sugar firstDissolve the sugar fully -- Three cupfuls of sugar will go into cold pulp only with patient stirring, and the recipe is explicit that you freeze only 'when dissolved'; undissolved sugar leaves the ice gritty and freezing uneven. Note that the recipe spends its water thinning the pulp for the sieve rather than making a syrup of it.
- The apricotsHalf a pound of stewed apricots most likely means dried fruit simmered soft rather than fresh, though the recipe does not say. Whether the half pound is weighed before or after stewing is left unclear; fresh apricots would give a paler, thinner result.
- "Remove the seeds from the bananas"Cultivated bananas have no true seeds. This means peel them and pick out the dark central specks and any bruised core before pressing the pulp through the sieve.
- SievingA medium-mesh sieve and a stiff rubber spatula or the back of a ladle do the job. Add the water gradually as directed — the liquid is what carries the thick banana pulp through the mesh.
- Three lemons is assertiveWith three oranges alongside, the mixture is sharply citrus. Taste before freezing; cold dulls both sweetness and acid, so it should taste slightly too sweet and too tart at room temperature.
- FreezingWritten for a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20–30 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for three to four hours.
- With or without the creamHalf a pint of cream turns this from a water ice into something closer to a sherbet, and it will scoop more softly. Add it cold, just before churning.
- Yield and keepingThe measured ingredients come to rather less than a gallon before churning, so the stated yield must assume the air the freezer beats in; expect appreciably less than a gallon in practice. With no stabiliser it stiffens in the freezer, so serve it the day it is made, or let it stand a little before scooping.
Books of this period use "cream" loosely for frozen desserts, and here the cream is optional and comes last, which suggests the name described a class of frozen dish rather than a fixed formula. What is striking is the banana: it appears matter-of-factly in a household recipe. Steamship traffic from Central America and the Caribbean brought bananas from a relative luxury in the 1870s to a common American fruit by about 1900. The gallon yield is a reminder that freezing was hand-cranked labour.