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Grape Ice Cream
This may be made with the fresh or preserved grape juice. Prepare a simple custard or ice cream foundation (See Introductory Recipes). Sweeten well when put on the stove; let scald, and cool, then partly freeze before adding the grape juice (in proportion of one pint grape juice to one quart of ice cream or custard mixture).
The recipe assumes you already know how to make a boiled custard and how to work a salt-and-ice freezer; the only real instruction here is when to add the juice. That timing is the whole point of the recipe.
- Why the juice goes in lateGrape juice is acidic, and acid can curdle a hot dairy custard on contact; adding it only once the mixture is cold and partly frozen is the likely reason for the order, though the recipe itself gives none.
- ProportionsOne pint juice to one quart custard, so the finished volume is about six cups, or roughly 1.5 quarts — eight to ten servings. Do not increase the juice; more liquid and more acid gives a coarse, icy texture.
- "Sweeten well"Cold blunts sweetness, and the grape juice adds tartness. Figure on about a cup of sugar per quart of custard base as a starting point, and taste the cold mixture before freezing rather than the warm one.
- Scalding the custard'Let scald' means heating to just short of a boil, stirring; the recipe gives no temperature. If the foundation is an egg custard, take it only to the point where it coats a spoon and do not let it boil, or the eggs will curdle; keep the heat moderate on a modern burner.
- Preserved grape juicePeriod 'preserved' juice was home-bottled and may or may not have been sweetened. Much American commercial grape juice today is Concord and tastes sweet even without added sugar, so you may want to reduce the sugar in the custard; unsweetened frozen concentrate, thawed and diluted, gives a cleaner flavor.
- StrainingFresh Concord juice carries a lot of pulp and tartrate crystals. Strain it through a fine sieve or cloth and chill it well, or the finished ice cream will be gritty.
- "Partly freeze"In a modern machine this is the stage where the base has thickened to soft-serve consistency, about two-thirds of the churn. Pour the cold juice in slowly, let it incorporate, then finish churning and harden in the freezer for two to three hours.
- ColorExpect a pale lavender-grey rather than purple. Concord pigment fades against egg yolk and cream; the older books sometimes corrected this with a little cochineal, which is not worth doing.
Grape ice cream belongs to the wave of American fruit cookery that followed the spread of the Concord grape, bred in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century and cheap and abundant by the time books like this one were compiled. Bottled unfermented grape juice had become a household staple — partly through temperance-movement enthusiasm for it as an alternative to wine — which meant a cook could make this dish in February as easily as in September, hence the recipe's opening note that fresh or preserved juice will both serve. The structure of the entry is also typical of the period: the custard base is cross-referenced to an introductory chapter rather than repeated, since a single "foundation" was expected to carry a dozen flavors, and the writer's only real contribution is the ratio and the warning about when to add the fruit.<|reserved_200000|>-Ma"];</invoke>