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Frozen Peaches
2 quarts fresh ripe peaches 2 cups sugar Juice of 1 1/2 lemons 1 quart water Scald the peaches. Remove the skins and the pits, and rub the fruit through a colander. Boil the sugar and water together for five minutes, and cool. To the syrup add the peach pulp and the lemon juice. Turn into a freezer. Stir until firm.
This is a peach water ice — no dairy, which is why it sits in a meatless book — and it depends almost entirely on getting the sugar-to-fruit-to-water ratio right so the mixture freezes soft rather than solid.
- "A freezer" means a churnIn this period a freezer is a hand-crank bucket packed with ice and rock salt, not the appliance in your kitchen. Use an ice cream machine; "stir until firm" is the instruction to keep the paddle turning for the 20-30 minutes it takes to reach the consistency of soft sorbet.
- If you have no machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours. The result is granita-textured rather than smooth, but the recipe tolerates it.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of peaches is a volume measure of prepared fruit, so figure roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb of whole peaches, yielding somewhere near a quart of pulp. Juice of 1 1/2 lemons is about 3 to 4 tablespoons. Total yield is around 2 to 2 1/2 quarts, serving 8 to 10.
- ScaldingThirty to sixty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold water, and the skins slip off. Longer than that and you begin cooking the outer flesh, which dulls the fresh flavor the recipe is built on.
- The colanderA colander here is doing the work of a food mill — pressing pulp through and holding back fibre and skin fragments. A food mill or a coarse sieve is the direct equivalent; a blender will also work but incorporates air and lightens the color.
- Cool the syrup fullyWarm syrup poured onto raw peach pulp partly cooks it and encourages browning. Chill the syrup and the pulp thoroughly before churning; a cold mix also freezes faster and finer.
- Don't cut the sugarThe two cups are structural, not just sweetening. Sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice scoopable; reduce it much and you get a solid block.
- ServingWater ices harden considerably in a modern deep freeze. Move it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before scooping.
Frozen desserts made with fruit, sugar and water rather than cream were standard in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century, and such ices had an obvious appeal for vegetarian and "meatless" collections because they contained nothing derived from an animal at all — no gelatine, no eggs, no milk. The method here is the familiar one: a cooked sugar syrup, cooled, combined with raw fruit pulp and acid, then churned in an ice-and-salt bucket freezer, the household machine that made frozen desserts practical at home from the 1840s onward. Lemon juice does double duty, brightening the peaches and slowing the browning that cut fruit begins the moment it is exposed to air.