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Concord Cream
1 pint cream 1 1/4 cups grape juice 1/3 cup sugar Lemon or fresh lime juice 1/2 cup heavy cream Pistachio nuts, finely chopped Mix cream, grape juice, and sugar. Add lemon or lime juice to taste. Freeze, and serve in glasses. Garnish with heavy cream beaten until stiff, sweetened, and flavored. Sprinkle cream with nuts.
A frozen Concord grape cream, essentially a simple still-frozen ice served in glasses under a cap of whipped cream. The one thing to watch is the acid: grape and citrus juice will curdle sweet cream if they meet it too warm or too fast.
- Combine cold, and slowlyHave the cream and the grape juice both thoroughly chilled, and stir the juice into the cream in a thin stream rather than dumping it in. Adding acidic juice to warm cream will flock it into visible curds, which no amount of freezing will smooth out.
- MeasuresA pint of cream is 2 cups; the recipe calls for that plus a further 1/2 cup heavy cream for the garnish. The pint was most likely what we would now call light or single cream, around 18-20 percent fat; half-and-half is the closest supermarket match, though all heavy cream gives a richer, denser result.
- \"Freeze\" means a freezer pail or a still-freeze"Freeze" means either a still-freeze in a mold or an ice-and-salt freezer pail -- the recipe does not say which. If still-freezing, pour into a shallow metal pan, freeze until firm at the edges, and beat or process the whole thing smooth two or three times during freezing, or it sets as a solid block of grape ice.
- Grape juiceConcord juice is the point of the dish: deep purple and musky. Unsweetened bottled Concord works; if using a sweetened juice, hold back part of the 1/3 cup sugar and taste before freezing.
- Season before freezing, not afterCold blunts both sweetness and acid, so the mixture should taste slightly too sweet and a shade too tart at room temperature. Add the lemon or lime a teaspoon at a time -- enough to lift the grape, not enough to make it lemonade.
- The garnish"Sweetened and flavored" suggests the 1/2 cup heavy cream whipped with a spoonful of sugar and a little vanilla, or a drop of the same citrus. Blanching and skinning the pistachios brings out the green, though unsalted roasted ones taste better.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart of frozen mixture, which fills six small stemmed glasses. Serve it soft rather than hard-frozen; taken straight from a modern freezer it will need ten minutes to come to the right spoonable state.
The Concord grape was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century and became the standard American table and juice grape, its labrusca musk the flavour Americans still recognise as "grape." Unfermented grape juice was widely bottled and promoted from the late 1800s onward, in part through temperance channels, which gave cookbooks of the period a sweet, strongly flavoured, non-alcoholic liquid to work into desserts where an earlier generation would have reached for wine. This dish sits under pudding sauces because it belongs to a family of cold cream mixtures that could be poured over a plain pudding or, as here, frozen and sent to table on its own -- the line between sauce and iced dessert was a thin one when both came out of the same freezer pail.