Home › The Apple › Baked Apple Ice Cream
Baked Apple Ice Cream
Pare, core, and quarter ten tart apples, baking with sugar and lemon or spice (see Baked Apples). When cold add one quart rich milk and cream, scalded and cooled, and freeze.
A fruit ice rather than a custard: baked apple pulp thinned with scalded dairy and churned. The original assumes you have already read the book's Baked Apples entry, and that you own a hand-crank freezer.
- Bake the apples first, and cool them fullyTen tart apples, pared and quartered, cook down to a few cups of pulp. The original gives no temperature or time; in a modern oven, roughly 350F for 40 to 50 minutes with sugar and a strip of lemon peel or a little cinnamon works, then chill thoroughly — the recipe is explicit that the pulp must be cold before the dairy goes in.
- Sugar is not specifiedThe recipe defers to the Baked Apples entry. For this quantity, start at 3/4 cup and taste the cold pulp: it should be distinctly sweeter than you want the finished ice cream, since freezing mutes sweetness by a noticeable margin.
- "Rich milk and cream"A quart total, and the proportion is left to you. Half whole milk and half heavy cream gives a rich but workable mixture. All cream makes it heavy against the apple.
- Why scald and coolScalding was partly a keeping measure in the days before reliable pasteurization, and partly to improve body. Bring the dairy to about 180F, hold a minute, then chill it completely before combining.
- Texture of the pulpBaked quarters stay fibrous. Press the pulp through a sieve or blitz it smooth before adding the dairy, or the finished ice cream will be stringy and will freeze in shards rather than churning creamy.
- FreezingIn an ice-and-salt churn this took 20 to 30 minutes of cranking. In a modern machine, chill the mixture to refrigerator temperature and churn 20 to 25 minutes, then harden in the freezer for two hours. There are no eggs and no stabilizer here, so it sets hard — let it stand 10 minutes before scooping.
- YieldAround two quarts, serving eight or more.
Fruit ice creams built on cooked pulp rather than a cooked custard were the everyday American form through the nineteenth century, a period in which eggs are often said to have been costly, and the hand-crank freezer was in use. This entry sits in a chapter given wholly to the apple, which is the point of the book: a single cheap, storable fruit stretched across the whole range of a household's cooking, from sauce and dumplings to a frozen dessert. The instruction to consult an earlier Baked Apples recipe rather than repeat the seasoning is typical of the period's compilations, which assumed a reader working straight through rather than dipping in. Tart apples are specified, though the recipe gives no reason.