Pear Ices
These may be made with fresh fruit if it is very mellow. and juicy, when it may easily be put through a colander or coarse sieve, or the fruit, stewed in syrup and put through a sieve can be used, letting cool and adding the juice of a lemon or a little wine. Sweet apple cider, grape juice, or perry may be used instead of the syrup with uncooked, mashed pears. The addition of the whipped whites of eggs, when the fruit is partly frozen, will make the ordinary sherbert. Large pears may be hollowed out and the ice served from these instead of from dishes or glasses. A cream may be made with the ice cream or custard foundation given in the Introductory Recipes, adding stewed, mashed, or spiced pears.
This is a method rather than a fixed formula — the author assumes you know roughly what a fruit ice is and gives you the variations. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The hinge: fruit ripenessPears must be genuinely mellow, meaning soft enough to purée raw. Underripe pears are gritty and astringent, and no amount of sugar will fix it in a frozen dessert. If the fruit resists the sieve, stew it in syrup first as the recipe allows.
- PerryPerry is fermented pear cider, the pear equivalent of hard apple cider. It has become available again from craft producers; a dry one works best here. "Sweet apple cider" in this period means unfermented apple juice.
- Syrup proportionsNo quantities are given. A workable base is 1 cup sugar dissolved in 1 cup water, cooled, for every 4 cups of pear purée, adjusted to taste — the mixture should taste slightly too sweet before freezing, since cold mutes sweetness. Lemon juice from one fruit per quart of purée is about right.
- Raw egg whitesWhipped whites folded into a partly frozen ice are never heated. Use pasteurized whites, sold in cartons, if anyone eating it is elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised. Italian meringue made with hot syrup gives the same lightening effect.
- Freezing without a churnAn ice-cream maker gives the smoothest result. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir the mixture thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours; the whipped whites go in when it is slushy but not solid, as the recipe says.
- Hollowed pearsChoose squat, wide varieties such as Comice or Anjou, scoop with a melon baller, brush the cut surfaces with lemon juice, and freeze the shells for an hour before filling so they do not soften the ice.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of pears, about five or six medium fruit, gives a little under a quart of puree and serves six to eight.
Fruit ices of this kind sat at the plain end of a large family of frozen desserts that American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century often distinguished, though the terms were used inconsistently from book to book: a water ice was fruit, sugar and water; a sherbet added beaten egg white or gelatine for body; an ice cream had dairy or a cooked custard behind it. This entry runs through all three from one fruit, and it expects the reader to flip back to a set of "Introductory Recipes" for the foundations, exactly as the last sentence here does. The mention of perry is a small period marker: pear cider was a farm product in England, and was also made in parts of the eastern United States, though never on the scale of apple cider, and its near-disappearance for most of the twentieth century is why the word now needs explaining. Serving an ice from the hollowed-out shell of its own fruit was a standard piece of table display, applied equally to oranges, melons and lemons.