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Strawberry Ice Cream
INGREDIENTS for a quart.- lb. of strawberries and the same of jam, 1 lemon, 1/2 lb. of sugar, 1/2 1/2 pint of cream, 1 pint of milk. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 9d.
Beat the fruit, lemon-juice and sugar into a pulp, add the jam, cream and milk; well mix together, and freeze as directed in Ices.
TIME.-25 minutes to freeze.
SEASONABLE. - When strawberries are in season.
A pre-custard ice: no eggs, no cooking, just fruit, jam, sugar, cream and milk churned down. The jam is doing real work here, so do not treat it as optional.
- The missing quantityThe ingredient line has dropped a number: "- lb. of strawberries and the same of jam." Whatever the weight was, the jam matched it. The figure cannot be recovered from this text, so treat any amount you settle on as a guess rather than a reading of the original.
- Why the jam mattersStrawberry jam contributes sugar, pectin and concentrated cooked-fruit flavour. The sugar depresses the freezing point and the pectin interferes with ice-crystal growth, which is what keeps an eggless ice from setting into a solid block. Reducing the jam will give you a harder, icier result.
- Seeds and pulp"Beat the fruit into a pulp" means mashing, not pureeing to smoothness. If you want a fine texture, press the mashed berries through a sieve before adding the jam; strawberry seeds are noticeable in a churned ice.
- The lemonOne lemon's juice for a quart is roughly 3 tablespoons. It sharpens flat, over-ripe fruit and cuts the sweetness of the jam. Add half, taste the unfrozen mixture, then decide on the rest.
- Cream and milkHalf a pint of cream to a pint of milk in imperial measure is about 285 ml to 570 ml. Use double or heavy cream; Victorian "cream" was considerably richer than modern single or light cream, and the fat is what carries the flavour.
- "Freeze as directed in Ices"The cross-referenced method is the pewter freezing pot packed in ice and coarse salt, worked with a spatula and scraped down as it sets. In a modern churn, chill the mixture thoroughly first, then churn 20 to 30 minutes and harden in the freezer for two to three hours before serving.
- The 25 minutesThat timing assumes constant scraping in an ice-and-salt bath. Unattended, the mixture will freeze in a coarse, grainy mass. Whatever equipment you use, the mixture must be kept moving throughout.
- YieldA quart, as stated, serving six to eight. The sugar content is high enough that it should stay softer than a plain water ice, though it may still want a few minutes out of a domestic freezer before it scoops cleanly.
Ice creams appear throughout Beeton under the heading "Ices", and the assumption behind every one of them is a supply of ice and coarse salt in the house. Through the second half of the nineteenth century that supply came largely from the commercial ice trade, which shipped block ice from Norway and North America into British ports and stored it in ice wells for distribution; the wealthy also drew on estate ice houses filled each winter. The recipe's economy is telling: strawberries were expensive and briefly seasonal, so half the fruit content comes from jam, which was cheap, keeping and always to hand. The 1s. 9d. costing and the blunt note "Seasonable: when strawberries are in season" are characteristic of the book's method throughout, which was to price a dish and tell the reader when it could sensibly be made rather than assume year-round supply.