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Strawberry Ice Cream
Allow a quart of berries, mashed and sweetened, to each quart of mixed milk and cream scalded. Freeze. (Also see Introductory Recipes.)
A Philadelphia-style ice cream in three sentences: no eggs, no custard, just fruit, dairy and a churn. The brevity assumes you already know how a crank freezer works.
- The proportionsA quart of mashed berries to a quart of scalded milk and cream makes roughly 2 quarts of finished ice cream, serving 8 to 10. The book leaves the milk-to-cream ratio to you; equal parts milk and heavy cream gives a rich mix, somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 percent fat, which churns well and does not freeze rock hard.
- SweeteningNo sugar quantity is given. For a quart of berries, 3/4 to 1 cup is the usual range, and the mixture should taste slightly too sweet at room temperature, since cold dulls sweetness sharply. Let the sugared berries stand 30 minutes so the sugar dissolves and the juice draws out.
- Why scaldScalding meant heating the dairy to just below boiling, around 180F. It was routine in the days before milk was generally pasteurised, and is no longer necessary with modern milk, though it does improve body slightly. Chill the scalded dairy thoroughly, to 40F or below, before it meets the fruit, or the acid and heat together may curdle it.
- Mash, do not pureeA potato masher or fork leaves fruit in pieces, which is what the recipe intends. A blender aerates the berries and turns them pale pink and foamy. Some cooks reserve a cup of chopped berries to fold in at the end of churning.
- "Freeze"This means a bucket freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt in roughly a 3:1 ratio by volume, cranked until the dasher stiffens, then packed and left to harden an hour or more. A modern machine with a pre-frozen bowl does the same job; the mixture must be refrigerator-cold going in.
- TextureEggless fruit ice creams freeze hard and icy because the berry water forms large crystals. A tablespoon or two of corn syrup, or a splash of kirsch, lowers the freezing point and keeps it scoopable, though neither is in the original.
- The cross-reference"Introductory Recipes" in books of this kind generally carried the base method for freezing, salting and packing, though this entry does not say what is there. Without it, this entry is a formula rather than instructions.
Ice cream made without eggs, from nothing but cream, sugar and flavouring, has long been called Philadelphia-style in American cookbooks, distinguished from the French or custard sort. Strawberry was among the earliest and most common flavours, and it needed no help: the fruit arrived in quantity in June, in the same weeks that ice cut the previous winter might still be stacked in the icehouse. A recipe this bare suggests how ordinary the technique was in a household with a crank freezer, and how the book handled it, trusting the reader to know the rest. The cross-reference to introductory recipes was a common editorial economy of the period, one freezing method printed once and pointed at from several entries.