Home › The Peach and Apricot › Peach Ice
Peach Ice
Pare and slice peaches and let stand two hours covered with sugar, allowing a pint of sugar for each quart of peaches. Blanch and crack a handful of the pits and add to the peaches. After letting stand strain and to each half gallon of syrup allow a pint of water. Freeze.
The peach base here is straightforward, but one step — steeping cracked peach kernels in an uncooked syrup — is the reason this cannot be made as printed. Use a current peach sorbet recipe instead.
- The cracked pits are the problemPeach kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. That is exactly what "blanch and crack a handful of the pits and add to the peaches" does, and the mixture is never heated at any point afterward.
- No dose control"A handful" of kernels steeped in an unspecified quantity of fruit gives no way to know how much amygdalin ends up in a serving. Frozen desserts are also eaten cold and in quantity, often by children, which is the worst case for an uncontrolled bitter-kernel infusion.
- Why the pits were there at allPeach and apricot kernels were a common cheap substitute for bitter almond, used to push a fruit ice toward the almond note associated with noyau. Commercial almond extract covers the same ground; the flavour was the point, not the kernel.
- The measures are all by volumeA pint of sugar is about 14 oz / 400 g, not a pound; a quart of sliced peaches is roughly 1.5 lb of fruit. The second step — a pint of water to each half gallon of strained syrup — is a 1:4 dilution, which tells you the maceration syrup was expected to be very heavy indeed.
- "Freeze" means a churnThis most likely means a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and coarse salt rather than a modern appliance. Still-freezing the same syrup in a tray gives a coarse, icy block rather than an ice.
- Two hours of maceratingThe standing time is doing real work: sugar draws juice out of the sliced fruit and gives you the syrup that is later strained off. The fruit solids are left behind, so what freezes is a clear syrup rather than a fruit purée.
Water ices were the plainest branch of the frozen desserts — fruit juice, sugar, water, and nothing dairy — and they appear in fruit-focused cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The kernel trick belongs to an older confectioner's habit: peach and apricot stones, cheap and abundant wherever fruit was preserved, were cracked for their bitter kernels and used to flavour custards, ratafias and the liqueur generally called noyau, from the French for fruit stone. Recipes using kernels in this way circulated freely, and the practice faded as commercial almond flavouring made the shortcut unnecessary.