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Peach Ice Cream
Pare, stone, and thoroughly mash ripened peaches and sweeten well. To each quart allow a quart of cream and new milk in equal proportion, scalded. Cool and freeze, adding, when half frozen, a cup of milk in which a few of the bruised kernels have been simmered.
The custard-free base here is straightforward, but the final flavouring step puts this recipe outside what can be made safely today.
- The kernels are the problemPeach stones enclose a kernel that contains amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or bruised and brought into contact with moisture. Bruising the kernels and steeping them in warm milk is precisely the condition that liberates it.
- No measured quantity"A few of the bruised kernels" gives no count, no weight, and no indication of kernel size. Amygdalin content varies widely between cultivars and between individual stones, so there is no way to know what dose ends up in the freezer can.
- Simmering does not make it safeGentle simmering in milk drives off some hydrogen cyanide but does not reliably destroy the amygdalin, and the flavoured milk is then stirred into a mixture that is frozen, not cooked. Nothing downstream reduces the hazard.
- Children and small portionsIce cream is served cold and sweet and in quantity to children, whose lower body weight makes any given dose proportionally larger. This is the population least suited to an unmeasured cyanogenic flavouring.
- Why the book calls for itThe kernel note is there for the bitter-almond aroma that nineteenth-century cooks prized in stone-fruit desserts. Commercial almond and noyau flavourings sold today are formulated for that flavour without the glycoside.
- If you want peach ice creamUse a current recipe. The rest of the method here — mashed sweetened fruit, scalded cream and milk in equal parts, churned — is unremarkable and well covered by modern sources.
Flavouring creams, custards and ratafias with the kernels of stone fruit is an old European habit, of which the French taste for noyau, a liqueur made by steeping apricot or peach kernels in spirit, is one expression among many. Because peach, apricot, cherry and plum kernels all carry the same bitter-almond note, cooks who had just stoned a bowl of fruit had the flavouring free in their hands, and household books repeated the instruction well into the late nineteenth century. Ice cream itself was a summer luxury that became a domestic possibility once hand-crank freezers with a rotating can in an ice-and-salt bath spread through American kitchens after the mid-1800s; recipes like this one, calling for equal parts cream and "new milk" — that is, fresh whole milk rather than skimmed — assume a household with both a dairy supply and access to ice. The kernel step went on appearing in print long after chemists had identified why bitter almonds and their relatives taste the way they do.