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Strawberry Ice Cream
Add two cups strawberry juice and pulp to Philadelphia Ice Cream. Freeze, and serve with Strawberry Sauce.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have already turned to the book's Philadelphia Ice Cream, which is an uncooked base of heavy cream and sugar with no eggs and no cooking. Everything hinges on how you prepare the two cups of fruit before it goes in.
- What "Philadelphia" meansNot a place-name flavour but a style: cream, sugar and flavouring, frozen raw, with no custard and no eggs. Reckon on roughly 1 quart cream to 1 cup sugar as the base this is added to.
- Juice and pulp, not whole berriesCrush ripe hulled strawberries with a fork or press them through a coarse sieve so you have two cups of loose juice and soft pulp. Whole or chopped berries freeze into hard, flavourless nuggets because their water content turns to ice.
- Sugar the fruit separatelyStir 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar into the crushed berries and let them stand 30 minutes before adding. This draws out juice, deepens the colour, and keeps the fruit from freezing solid; it is also why the base may need slightly less sugar than the plain version.
- Add the fruit cold and lateChill both the cream base and the fruit thoroughly, then combine just before churning. Warm acidic fruit stirred into cream can curdle it, and a warm mixture churns to a coarse texture.
- FreezingA modern ice cream maker replaces the ice-and-rock-salt bucket freezer; period manuals commonly give about three parts crushed ice to one part coarse salt. Churn 20 to 30 minutes, until it holds the trace of a spoon.
- RipeningPeriod manuals direct that the frozen can be packed in fresh ice and salt for an hour or two to firm and mellow it. Transfer to a covered container in the freezer for at least two hours to the same end; served straight from the churn it is soft and tastes flat.
- YieldWith a quart of cream in the base, the finished quantity is about 1 1/2 quarts, or 8 to 10 servings.
- The sauceIf you skip the book's Strawberry Sauce, hold back a little of the macerated fruit and spoon it over instead.
Philadelphia-style ice cream — pure cream and sugar, frozen without eggs — was the American counterpoint to the French custard base, and by the time Lowney's chocolate company issued its cook book in 1907 the distinction was standard vocabulary in household manuals; Philadelphia had a reputation through the nineteenth century for the quality of its cream and its ice cream trade, which is generally given as the source of the name. Strawberry was a common early flavour: the fruit needed no processing beyond crushing and sugaring, and ice cream season and strawberry season coincided in the days before mechanical refrigeration. The extreme brevity of the entry is typical of the period's cookbooks, which built flavour variations as one-line amendments to a master recipe rather than repeating it.