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Frozen Peaches
Follow the recipe for frozen strawberries, substituting a quart of sliced peaches, preferably yellow ones, for the berries. sliced peaches, preferably yellow ones, for the berries.
This is a one-line variation that leans entirely on the frozen strawberry recipe elsewhere in the section, so the useful work is in knowing what that base recipe would have been and how peaches behave differently in it.
- Read the parent recipe firstNothing here stands alone: quantities of sugar, water and lemon, and whether the mixture is churned or still-frozen, all come from the strawberry entry. Locate it before you start rather than guessing at proportions.
- What a fruit ice of this period looked likeFrozen berries in a book of this vintage usually means crushed or sliced fruit, sugar, a little water and lemon juice, frozen in a crank freezer. Proportions varied a good deal from book to book, so if the parent recipe is missing, treat something in the region of a quart of fruit to 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar and a cup of water with the juice of a lemon as a starting point to be tasted and adjusted, not a reconstruction of what stood on the facing page.
- A quart of sliced peachesThat is volume, not weight: roughly 1 1/2 lb of prepared slices, which is about five to six medium peaches before peeling and pitting. Slice, then measure.
- Why yellow onesYellow-fleshed peaches are generally more acid and more deeply coloured than white-fleshed ones, so the frozen mixture tastes of peach rather than of sweetened cold. Flesh colour and freestone/clingstone are separate matters, and both flesh colours came in either. Ripe to the point of fragrance is what you want; underripe fruit disappears once frozen.
- BrowningPeaches oxidise far faster than strawberries. Toss the slices with the lemon juice as you cut them, not at the end, or the finished ice will be the colour of weak tea.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessSugar is what keeps a fruit ice scoopable. If you cut it back, the mixture freezes to a solid block. Taste the unfrozen mixture: it should be noticeably sweeter than you want the finished dessert to be, since cold mutes sweetness.
- FreezingAn ice-cream machine handles this directly. For an old-style bucket freezer, pack three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt; for still-freezing in a shallow pan, stir the mixture down every 30 minutes as it sets to break up ice crystals.
- Yield and servingDepending on how much sugar and liquid the parent recipe calls for, expect somewhere around 1 1/2 quarts, six to eight servings. Let it stand a few minutes out of the freezer before serving.
- The doubled lineThe repeated phrase at the end is a duplication in the text as it comes down to us, not a second instruction.
Loose-leaf cook books were a publishing format as much as a culinary one: pages were issued to be clipped into a binder so a household could add, reorder and interleave its own clippings and cards, and recipes could be written tersely on the assumption that the neighbouring page was within reach -- which may be part of why this entry is two lines long. Frozen fruit ices belonged to the summer end of the American dessert repertoire, made in a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt, and such sections commonly ran strawberry, raspberry, peach and pineapple as variations on a single method. The instruction to prefer yellow peaches points to flavour and colour rather than to scarcity: white-fleshed peaches were still sold, but yellow-fleshed varieties were already widely grown by this period.