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Pineapple Ice Cream
Whip two quarts rich, sweet cream to a froth, with two teacups powdered white sugar. Use a patent egg-whip with a wheel, if convenient; if not, use the common egg-whip.
Grate two ripe pineapples, and add to them two teacups white sugar. When well mixed, stir into the cream.
Pour into the freezer, reserving one-fourth. When it begins to freeze, it will sink; then beat in the remainder with a strong iron spoon. Beat every time the freezer is opened to cut down the cream from the sides. Never cook fruit of any sort to make cream.--Mrs. S. T.
An uncooked, whipped-cream style ice cream from the era of the hand-crank freezer. It scales large and depends on one thing above all: raw pineapple and dairy do not sit together comfortably.
- The hinge: bromelainFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down milk proteins and can turn dairy bitter and thin quite quickly. Mrs. S. T.'s instruction to never cook fruit is the aesthetic of her day, but it is also why this mixture is best got into the freezer at once and eaten the same day. Briefly heating the grated pineapple, or using canned (already heat-processed) pineapple, deactivates the enzyme; it costs some fresh perfume and buys stability.
- TeacupsA teacup is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup in recipes of this period, though the book does not define it; on that reading two teacups is about 1 1/2 cups. That gives about 3 cups sugar in total against 2 quarts cream and two pineapples — sweet by modern taste, though sugar is also what keeps the texture soft rather than icy.
- The freezer"The freezer" is a churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, about 3 parts ice to 1 part salt by volume. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn in batches; the recipe fills a gallon-plus canister, which most home machines will not take at once.
- Patent egg-whip with a wheelA geared rotary beater, not yet in every kitchen — hence "if convenient." A stand mixer or hand mixer does the same work. Whip the cream only to soft peaks — stiff cream folded into fruit purée deflates and weeps in the churn.
- The reserved quarterHolding back a fourth of the mixture and beating it in once the churn has begun to set is an early aeration trick, standing in for the paddle work a modern machine does continuously. With a powered churn it is unnecessary; if you are using a hand freezer, it is worth doing, and scraping the frozen film off the sides each time you open the lid matters as much.
- PineapplesTwo ripe pineapples of the size sold today yield roughly 6 to 7 cups of grated fruit and juice — a very high proportion of fruit for this quantity of cream. Draining off some of the juice gives a firmer set.
- YieldAbout a gallon finished, serving sixteen to twenty. It is best straight from the churn; because there are no eggs or stabilizers, it hardens to a solid block overnight.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and usually dated to 1878 (some printings 1879), gathered contributions from Virginia households and printed them under initials, as here. Ice cream in such a book signals a house with an ice house or a standing ice delivery, and pineapple signals money spent: the fruit came north by schooner from the West Indies and remained expensive, and it is often said that a whole one served as a display piece on a sideboard before it was dessert. The insistence on raw fruit reflects a nineteenth-century conviction that cooking coarsened delicate flavors, and it is one reason pineapple ice creams of this type gave way to versions made with commercially canned pineapple, heat-treated in the can, once that became widely available around the turn of the century.