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Strawberry Ice Cream
1 qt. strawberries 1 cup granulated sugar 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar 2 cups XX cream 1/2 cup single cream 1 teaspoon vanilla pinch of salt Wash, stem and crush berries with sugar. Heat to boiling point. Remove from fire, add salt and cool. Run through sieve. Whip cream; add vanilla and confectioners' sugar and place in refrigerator to keep cool. Fold whipped cream into fruit mixture and pour into tray of refrigerator.
A still-frozen ice cream from the era when a household refrigerator's freezing compartment was a novelty and the metal ice tray did the work of a churn. The method is sound; a few of the terms are not.
- XX creamIn period recipe books "XX" appears to mark the richest cream sold; use heavy or whipping cream. The half cup of "single cream" is light cream or half-and-half; the directions never say where it is added, and whole milk would serve the same purpose.
- A quart of strawberriesSold by volume, a quart box runs about 1 1/2 lb, giving roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of crushed fruit once hulled. Frozen berries, thawed, work in the same weight.
- Why the berries are boiledBringing the crushed fruit and sugar to a boil dissolves the sugar completely into the juice. Do not boil it down; the moment it reaches a full boil, pull it off.
- SievingPushing the cooled purée through a sieve removes the seeds, which otherwise read as grit in a frozen custard-free base. A fine mesh strainer and a rubber spatula do the job; expect to lose a few tablespoons of pulp.
- Cool means coldFold whipped cream into a warm purée and it deflates. Chill the sieved fruit thoroughly in the refrigerator, ideally to 40F, before combining.
- Freezing without a churnA modern freezer runs far colder than a 1930s refrigerator compartment, so this will set harder and faster. Freeze in a shallow metal pan, and stir the edges into the centre with a fork two or three times over the first two hours to keep the texture even.
- ServingMakes roughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. With no egg and little to hold the texture, it firms up solid; let it stand at room temperature 10 to 15 minutes before scooping, and eat it within a couple of days.
Recipes like this one belong to the period when the household refrigerator's freezing compartment was new: through the 1920s and 1930s, manufacturers of electric refrigerators published menu and recipe booklets to demonstrate what the new freezing compartment could do, and "refrigerator desserts" became a genre of their own. The technique here, folding sweetened whipped cream into a fruit purée and freezing it still, without agitation, is close to what confectioners call a semifreddo or mousse-style ice; the whipped cream supplies the air that a dasher would otherwise beat in. The two sugars are doing separate jobs, granulated to cook with the berries, confectioners' (which contains cornstarch) to sweeten the cream.