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Strawberry Cream
Four quarts thick sweet cream, four quarts strawberries. The berries must be mashed or bruised, caps and all, with a teacup of granulated sugar to each quart. After standing several hours, strain through a thin coarse cloth. Put four teacups of white sugar to the cream, and then add the juice of the berries. Whip or froth the cream with a patent egg-beater. Pour two-thirds of the cream into the freezer, reserving the rest to pour in after it begins to freeze. Raspberry cream may be made by the same recipe.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a hand-cranked strawberry ice cream, built on strained fruit juice rather than purée, and it is scaled for a household party. A few conversions and one structural decision matter.
- Scale it downFour quarts of cream plus the juice of four quarts of berries makes well over a gallon of mix, and more again once churned. A quarter batch — 1 quart cream, 1 quart berries — is about as much as a standard 1.5-quart domestic machine will hold.
- "Teacup"In American cookbooks of this period a teacup is usually reckoned at 6 fluid ounces, or three-quarters of a cup, though the term is genuinely loose and some writers used it for a half cup. Four teacups of sugar to four quarts of cream is roughly 3 cups; taste the mixture cold before freezing.
- "Thick sweet cream"Sweet here means unsoured, not sugared. Use heavy whipping cream at 36 percent fat, and avoid ultra-pasteurised cream if you can, since it whips to a coarser, less stable froth.
- "The freezer"The freezer is the ice-and-salt crank churn, not a compartment of the refrigerator. Any modern churn works; a still-frozen version in a loaf pan will be denser and grainier because the whipped air is the whole point of the method.
- Strain or don'tMashing the berries with sugar and standing them several hours draws out a bright, deeply coloured juice, and straining it through cloth gives a completely smooth, almost sorbet-clean cream. If you would rather keep the fruit body, press the pulp through a sieve instead and expect a heavier, paler result.
- Hulls in"Caps and all" means the green hulls go into the mash and are strained out with the pulp. They add a faint tannic edge; there is no harm in hulling first if you prefer.
- Why two-thirds firstWhipped cream deflates as it is churned. Holding back a third and adding it once the mixture has begun to set keeps some of that air in the finished cream, which is what gives this style its lightness.
- Acid and creamStrawberry juice is acidic enough to thin or lightly curdle cream if it sits. Fold the juice in and get the mixture into the churn promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Yield and servingThe full recipe serves thirty or more. Ice cream made without eggs or stabilisers hardens quickly in a modern freezer, so let it sit ten minutes at room temperature before scooping.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 contributors from Virginia and her sister states, which is why so many of its recipes end with initials rather than a name. Ice cream had a long history in the state by then — Jefferson served it at Monticello, and ice houses were standard on substantial plantations — but it remained a summer luxury that depended on stored winter ice and a good deal of arm work. The mention of a "patent egg-beater" places the recipe in the era after geared rotary beaters, in production from the 1850s and 1860s, made whipping four quarts of cream a plausible domestic task; earlier cooks did the same job with a bundle of twigs or a perforated whisk and a great deal more time. The eggless, fruit-juice style seen here appears in American household books alongside custard-based recipes, and it depends entirely on the quality of the cream.