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Other Sweet Dishes: Juice
PEACH ICE CREAM 3/4 cup of peach pulp Juice of 1/2 lemon 3/4 cup of granulated sugar 1 1/2 cups of thin cream Pare and stone choice, ripe peaches and press the pulp through a "ricer;" add the sugar and lemon juice and turn into the can of a freezer, packed in ice and salt; add the cream and freeze as usual.
PEACH CUP Peach Ice Cream as above 1/2 an orange, peeled, seeded 2 peaches, pared and sliced and sliced Sugar to sweeten Mix the prepared fruit with the sugar; put into chilled cups and dispose peach ice cream above. PEACH SHERBET 2 cups of water Juice of 1 orange or equivalent 1 cup of sugar of peach pulp 3/4 cup of peach pulp Juice of 1/2 lemon Boil the sugar and water twenty minutes; let cool, add the fruit juice and freeze. This may be used with slices of fruit for "Peach Cup." Pineapple and peaches make a particularly good combination for "fruit cup." GRAPEFRUIT SHERBET 2 cups of water 1 cup of juice 1 cup of sugar Juice of 1 lemon Juice of 1 grapefruit or Candied cherries, chopped fine Boil the sugar and water twenty minutes; let cool, add the fruit juice and freeze. Serve in cups with chopped cherries sprinkled on top. BLOOD ORANGE SHERBET 2 cups of water 1 tablespoonful of cold water 1 cup of sugar Juice of 3 or 4 "blood" 1/4 teaspoonful of granulated oranges gelatine Juice of 1/2 lemon Boil the sugar and water twenty minutes; add the gelatine, soaked in the cold water, and when cold add the fruit juice and freeze as usual. COFFEE PARFAIT 1/2 tablespoonful of gelatine 2 yolks of eggs 1/8 cup of cold water cup of sugar 1 cup of strong coffee 1 1/2 cups of double cream Soak the gelatine in the cold water. Heat the coffee with half the sugar. Beat the yolks, add the rest of the sugar and beat again; cook the yolks in the coffee as boiled custard and when slightly thickened add the gelatine and strain into a cold dish; stir until the mixture thickens a little, fold in the cream, beaten solid, and finish as usual.
A cluster of frozen desserts scaled for two, all written for a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer. The proportions still work; the equipment and a few of the terms need translating.
- Thin cream and double cream"Thin cream" is light cream, roughly 18-20 percent butterfat; light cream is the closest supermarket match, with half-and-half a thinner substitute. "Double cream" in an American book of this period means heavy whipping cream, and in the parfait it should be whipped "solid" — stiff, not soft peaks — before folding.
- The twenty-minute syrupBoiling one cup of sugar with two cups of water for a full twenty minutes is not merely dissolving it; a good deal of water leaves the pan and the syrup concentrates. How much depends on the pan, so cover it or watch the volume. A thinner, under-boiled syrup gives an icy sherbet.
- Peach pulp and the ricerA ricer here is doing the job of a food mill: forcing soft fruit through perforations while holding back skin and fibre. A food mill or a sieve gives the same result; a blender will chop skin and fibre into the pulp and beat air into it. Ripe peaches will slip their skins after about 30 seconds in boiling water.
- Ice and saltFor a crank freezer, pack in layers of crushed ice and rock salt at about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, and churn until the handle stiffens. In a modern machine, chill each mixture thoroughly first and churn 20-25 minutes; without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard with a fork every 30 minutes.
- The coffee custardThis is the hinge of the parfait. Cook the yolks in the hot coffee over low heat or a water bath, stirring, until it coats a spoon at about 175-180F, then strain at once — pushed past that it curdles and no amount of straining recovers the texture.
- An ambiguous measureThe sugar in the Coffee Parfait is printed simply as "cup of sugar" with the fraction lost. Judging by the other recipes and the two yolks, something between a third and a half cup is the sensible reading; start at a third and taste the custard.
- GelatineA quarter teaspoon in the blood orange sherbet and half a tablespoon in the parfait are both small doses of granulated gelatine, used for smoothness rather than set. Measure it level and do not increase it, or the sherbet turns gummy.
- Blood orangesBlood oranges were still an uncommon sight in American markets, which may be why the book puts "blood" in quotation marks. Three or four will yield roughly a cup of juice; today's Moro or Tarocco, in season roughly December to April, give the deepest colour.
- YieldThe peach ice cream starts from roughly three cups of mixture and the sherbets from a little over two, so each makes nearer a pint and a half to a quart than a pint — two generous servings, as intended, or four small ones. The sherbets are high in sugar and stay comparatively scoopable in a home freezer; the peach ice cream, with no eggs or stabiliser, freezes hard and wants ten minutes on the counter.
Cooking for Two came out of the Boston Cooking School circle in the early 1900s, when the small household — a young couple, a widow and a companion, two women sharing rooms — was increasingly, if unevenly, acknowledged as a cooking problem in its own right, at a time when domestic manuals were often said to assume a larger family with help in the kitchen. Frozen desserts belonged in such a book because the hand-cranked freezer with its inner can, dasher and jacket of ice and rock salt had become more affordable for ordinary kitchens, and small quantities suited it well. The distinction the chapter keeps between ice cream, sherbet and parfait is a real one of the period: cream frozen with churning, a boiled syrup with fruit juice, and an unchurned custard-and-whipped-cream mixture that sets still in a mould. "Peach cup" and "fruit cup" reflect the fashion for sweetened fresh fruit served in chilled glasses, a course that could open or close a meal and that survives on menus as the fruit cup well into the mid-century.