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Strawberry Ice Cream
3 pints thin cream 2 quarts berries 2 cups sugar Wash and hull the strawberries; sprinkle them with sugar and let them stand. Mash thoroughly; mix with the cream and freeze. 3 pints thin cream
A three-ingredient Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just fruit, sugar and cream churned until frozen. Everything depends on the fruit and on how cold you get the mix before it goes in the machine.
- Thin creamThin cream is light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20 percent butterfat, sold today as light cream in the US and single cream in the UK; half-and-half is thinner, around 10-12 percent. Using all heavy cream gives a heavier, greasier result; a mix of about two parts half-and-half to one part heavy cream sits close to the original.
- Yield is largeThree pints of cream plus two quarts of mashed berries makes something over three quarts of finished ice cream, well beyond the capacity of a standard 1.5-quart domestic machine. Halve or quarter the quantities, or churn in batches.
- Freeze means an ice-and-salt churnWhen this was written, freezing meant packing a hand-cranked canister in cracked ice and rock salt and turning it for twenty to thirty minutes. Any modern churn does the same job; whatever the machine, chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first, since a warm mix churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- Let the berries sitThe standing time after sugaring is not idle. Give the berries at least half an hour so the sugar draws out juice and softens them; the resulting syrup is what keeps the fruit from freezing into hard red pebbles.
- Mash, and consider strainingMashing by hand leaves recognisable pieces of fruit, which is the intended texture. If you want it smoother, push half the mash through a sieve to remove seeds and leave the rest coarse. Do not puree the lot in a blender unless you want a uniform pink with no fruit character.
- Sugar and berry sweetnessTwo cups of sugar to two quarts of berries is on the modest side by modern standards, and sugar does more than sweeten here: it lowers the freezing point and keeps the ice cream scoopable. With flat supermarket strawberries, taste the sugared fruit before mixing and add a little more if it is thin, plus a squeeze of lemon to sharpen it.
- StorageWith no eggs and no stabiliser, this sets very hard in a home freezer and turns icy within a day or two. Eat it the day it is made, and let it stand ten minutes at room temperature before scooping.
Philadelphia ice cream, meaning a plain uncooked mixture of cream, sugar and flavouring with no egg custard, was one common form of domestic ice cream in the nineteenth century, alongside cooked custard recipes that appear throughout the period. Mrs. Fryer's book appears to belong to the early twentieth-century wave of loose-leaf cookbooks, said to have been issued in binders so a household could add pages, reorder sections, and slip in clippings of its own; the format is generally thought to have assumed a cook who would keep building the book rather than read it through. The recipe's brevity is a period marker in itself: freezing needed no explanation to a reader who owned a crank freezer and could buy ice by the block, so the author spends her words on the fruit and leaves the machine to look after itself.