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Cherry Ice Cream
Put one pound of granulated sugar and one-half pint of water in a saucepan over the fire. Stir until the sugar is all dissolved, then let the syrup come to a boil. Drop in gently one quart of white cherries, pitted, and let simmer fifteen minutes. Strain carefully, and when the syrup is cold add one quart of sweet cream and freeze. When it gets rather thick remove the dasher, beat well with a wooden paddle and stir in the fruit.
Pack and let stand three or four hours to ripen. Another very nice way to serve cherry ice cream is to stone and crush the cherries and add sugar to make very sweet. Chill on ice. Put a spoonful of the crushed fruit in small glasses and heap over vanilla ice cream.-Mary F. Snider.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just fruit syrup and cream. The syrup does all the work, so getting it cold before it meets the cream is the whole trick.
- Weights and measuresOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups; one-half pint of water is 1 cup. A quart of cherries runs roughly 1¼ to 1½ pounds, and the recipe does not make clear whether the quart is measured before or after pitting.
- White cherriesThese are pale sweet cherries — Rainier, Royal Ann, Napoleon (the last two are essentially one variety under two names). Presumably the pale fruit tints the cream a soft blush rather than dyeing it magenta, though the recipe does not say so. Dark Bings work fine if you accept the color.
- Sweet creamIn 1900 "sweet" simply meant not soured. Use heavy cream, or half heavy cream and half whole milk if a full quart of heavy cream reads as too rich; the sugar syrup already carries considerable body.
- Chill the syrup thoroughlyThe instruction to add the cream only when the syrup is cold is the hinge. A warm mix churns slowly and freezes coarse and grainy. Refrigerate the strained syrup several hours or overnight.
- The dasher and the fruitWith a modern machine, churn until it holds soft-serve consistency, then fold the reserved simmered cherries in by hand. Fruit added at the start jams the paddle and freezes into stones.
- Packing and ripeningThe original means repacking the canister in ice and salt. The freezer does this: transfer to a chilled container, press plastic wrap to the surface, and hold 3 to 4 hours. The texture genuinely improves — it is not an idle step.
- The fifteen-minute simmerLong by modern instinct, but correct here. The cherries are being candied into the syrup, not cooked to sauce. They will be soft and translucent, which is what you want folded into cream.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving ten to twelve. The second method — crushed sweetened cherries spooned over vanilla — needs no machine at all and is worth the two minutes.
Frozen desserts fill a whole section of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks because the ice trade had made them a home project rather than a confectioner's specialty: by the 1890s a hand-crank freezer could be had cheaply and ice was delivered to the door. This is the older Philadelphia style, cream and fruit and sugar with no egg custard, generally distinguished in period books from the richer "French" custard ice creams. The preference for white cherries is a detail that has largely dropped out of American cooking; Royal Ann and Napoleon were the standard canning cherries of the era, and pale-fleshed varieties are often said to have been favored for the delicate look they gave a dessert.