Home › The Peach and Apricot › Cream of Peach Sherbet
Cream of Peach Sherbet
Scald a quart of rich milk, dissolving in it a cup of sugar. Let simmer eight minutes, then cool, adding to it when cold a pint of peach pulp sweetened and flavoured. When half frozen add the whites of two eggs whipped, and complete the freezing.
A hand-cranked custardless ice, thickened at the end with raw beaten egg white. The dairy and fruit are unobjectionable; the finishing step is the problem.
- Why it failsThe whipped whites of two eggs go into the mixture when it is already half frozen and are never heated at any point. Freezing does not destroy Salmonella; it merely suspends it, and a sherbet held in a freezer for days keeps whatever the shells carried into it. A current recipe using a heated base should be used instead.
- The scalded milk is not the safeguardScalding and simmering the milk pasteurises the dairy only. By the time the whites are added the mixture is at or below freezing, so nothing carries over to them. The recipe does not say why the milk is simmered eight minutes; whatever it does for the body of the mixture, it does nothing to protect the finished ice.
- "Rich milk"In this period the term generally meant unhomogenised whole milk with the cream left in, so fatter than modern bottled whole milk. There is no cooked custard here, so what body the ice has comes largely from that fat.
- UnitsA quart is 4 cups, a pint of peach pulp 2 cups. Peach pulp means ripe fruit peeled, stoned and pressed through a sieve or worked to a purée — not chopped fruit, which freezes into hard chips.
- "Flavoured"Left open by the original. Lemon juice to sharpen the peaches or a little almond flavouring to echo the kernel would both suit. If bitter almond or peach-kernel water is used, note that peach kernels are cyanogenic and are a separate hazard.
- "Half frozen"The stage in a crank freezer where the mixture has thickened to a slush and no longer sloshes. It is the point at which anything folded in will stay suspended rather than sink.
- YieldRoughly six cups of finished sherbet before any air is beaten in, serving six to eight.
Nineteenth-century American cookery generally distinguished ice cream, built on a cooked cream or custard base, from sherbet or water ice, built on fruit juice and sugar, though period usage was blurry. Recipes like this one seem to sit between the two, which may be what the name "cream of peach sherbet" is announcing: the fruit and the lightness of a sherbet, with milk for body. Beaten egg white is often said to have served for the middle ground, since it added volume and a smoother grain without the labour or the expense of a custard. Peaches earned their own chapter in fruit books of this kind because the American crop was enormous and desperately perishable; a household with a bearing tree faced a week or two of glut each summer, and freezing, canning and preserving recipes multiplied to absorb it.