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Peach Ice Cream
3 pints thin cream 2 cups sugar 1 quart sliced peaches Cover the peaches with the sugar; let stand, mash and add to the cream and freeze.
This is one of the terser entries in the book — it assumes you own an ice cream freezer and know how much cream goes in one. The second line of ingredients appears to be a stray fragment (a plain sugar syrup, or the beginning of the sherbet recipe that followed on the same leaf); it plays no part in the peach ice cream.
- The missing creamNo quantity is given. Recipes of this style commonly used roughly a quart of cream, or a mix of 1 pint heavy cream and 1 pint whole milk, but the amount should be treated as genuinely unspecified in the original rather than as a typo with one right answer.
- Macerate, don't rushThe hinge of the recipe is the standing time. Sugar draws juice out of the peaches and, more importantly, keeps that juice from freezing into hard shards. Give the sugared fruit at least an hour at room temperature, or several hours refrigerated, before mashing.
- Mash, not purée"Mash" means a coarse crush with a potato masher or fork. A blender aerates the fruit and turns the finished cream a dull tan; hand-mashing leaves recognizable pieces and a better color.
- Chill before churningThe original says only "add to the cream and freeze." Combine fruit and cream and refrigerate the mixture to about 40F first — a warm mix churns slowly in any machine and comes out grainy.
- Freezing, then and now"Freeze" means a crank or electric bucket freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked 20-25 minutes. In a modern compressor or frozen-bowl machine, churn until it holds soft ridges, then harden 2-3 hours in the freezer.
- Peaches matterFreestone peaches at full ripeness, peeled. Underripe fruit gives almost no perfume once frozen, since cold flattens aroma; taste the sugared fruit and adjust before it meets the cream.
- YieldAssuming about a quart of cream, roughly 2 quarts, serving 8 to 10.
Fruit ice creams made this way — sugared raw fruit stirred into plain sweet cream, with no eggs and no cooked custard base — were long known in American books as the Philadelphia style, and peach was among the most common flavors in the late-summer chapters of household cookery. The brevity here may well be a function of the book's format: a loose-leaf cook book was, by most accounts, sold as a binder of removable pages, so a housekeeper could pull out the leaf she was working from, prop it up, and later insert clippings and her own handwritten sheets alongside the printed ones. Such a design would have encouraged compression, and it may also explain the orphaned "2 cups sugar 1 quart water" at the end, which appears to belong to a neighboring recipe on the same page. The instruction to "freeze" without further comment reflects how ordinary the hand-cranked ice and salt freezer had become in domestic kitchens by this period — a machine generally credited in its American form to Nancy Johnson's mid-nineteenth-century design, and by then a fixture no author felt obliged to describe.