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Peach Ice Cream
Add two cups stewed and strained peaches to Philadelphia Ice Cream. Flavor with one teaspoon lemon juice. Freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Philadelphia Ice Cream in front of you. Everything hinges on that base and on how much water the fruit carries into it.
- Philadelphia Ice CreamAn eggless base: cream, sugar and flavoring, frozen without cooking or custard. Period recipes commonly run to roughly 1 quart cream and about 1 cup sugar, the sugar dissolved cold. It is not a frozen custard, and no cooking step is implied here.
- "Stewed and strained"Cook peeled, pitted peaches gently with a little sugar until soft, then press through a sieve. Straining removes skin and fiber, which would otherwise freeze into tough flecks. The result should be a thick puree, not a syrup.
- Drain off free liquidTwo cups of watery puree in a quart of cream is the difference between ice cream and a coarse ice. Cook the fruit down until it mounds on a spoon, and cool it completely before it meets the cream.
- The lemon juiceNot incidental. A teaspoon of acid keeps cooked peach from tasting flat. The recipe does not say when to add it; stirring it into the fruit rather than straight into the cream avoids curdling in pockets.
- SweetnessThe fruit dilutes the base and canned or very ripe peaches bring their own sugar. Taste the mixture cold before churning; a mix that tastes correctly sweet at room temperature will taste under-sweet frozen.
- Freezing"Freeze" meant a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. A modern churn does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes with the bowl frozen solid beforehand.
- HardeningStraight from the churn this is soft. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two. Fruit ice creams without eggs set hard, so let it stand five to ten minutes before serving.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 quarts if the base is built on a quart of cream, enough for eight to ten servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in the early 1900s by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it surrounded its promotional chocolate recipes with a full general household repertoire. "Philadelphia ice cream" was the standing American term for a plain cream freeze with no eggs, distinguished from the richer cooked custard sold as French; the name is generally traced to that city's nineteenth-century reputation for the dairy version. Building fruit flavors as one-line variations on a master base was ordinary practice in printed cookbooks of the period, when a household with an ice-and-salt freezer would churn whatever the season offered, and peaches in late summer might be stewed first, though period books also give raw mashed peach ice creams.