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Fresh-Fruit Ice-Cream
Prepare fruit by sprinkling sugar over it. Let it stand one hour, press through a coarse sieve and stir into American ice-cream when the cream is frozen to a mush. If seed fruits, such as currants, are used, strain through a fine sieve or a piece of cheese-cloth and use the juice only. The juice can be put into the freezer with the cream and not served until later, as in the case of the mashed fruits. Grated pineapple with the addition of a little lemon-juice makes a particularly fine fruit cream.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's "American ice-cream" (a plain uncooked cream-and-sugar base) and are folding fruit into it partway through freezing. No quantities are given, so the proportions are yours to set.
- How much fruitThe recipe gives no quantities. As a starting point, something in the region of 1 to 2 cups of sieved fruit pulp to a quart of cream base works; push much beyond that and the mixture tends to turn icy, because fruit is mostly water and its sugar lowers the freezing point.
- Sugar for the fruitFigure roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per cup of prepared fruit, less for very ripe berries. The hour of standing draws out juice and dissolves the sugar so it does not sit as grit in the finished cream.
- "Frozen to a mush"This is the stage where the mixture holds a soft ribbon but will still take a stir — in a modern machine, the point at which it looks like thick soft-serve. Adding fruit earlier dilutes the base and slows freezing; adding it later means streaks you cannot work out.
- Coarse sieve, fine sieveBerries and stone fruit go through a coarse sieve so some pulp carries through. Currants, gooseberries and grapes have hard seeds that will not soften in a frozen dessert, so those are strained to juice through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth.
- Fresh pineappleRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down milk protein and turns dairy thin and faintly bitter within hours. Bring the grated pineapple and its juice to a simmer for a minute or two and cool it before use if the ice-cream is not to be eaten the same day.
- Churn vs. still-freezeAn electric machine handles this well. If you are freezing in a tub without a dasher, beat the base smooth twice during freezing before folding the fruit in at the mush stage, or the fruit juice will freeze in separate shards.
- Ripening and yieldLet the finished cream stand packed and covered for an hour before serving; the flavour of the fruit comes forward as the ice softens slightly. A quart of base plus fruit gives about six servings.
Fruit ice-creams of this kind belong to the era of the hand-cranked freezer, when a household made one plain base — cream, sugar, sometimes a cooked custard — and rang changes on it with whatever was in season. Macerating fruit in sugar and then sieving it is a long-established treatment, used also for fruit fools and for bottling, and it does two jobs at once, dissolving the sugar and loosening the pulp from skins and seeds. Canned pineapple became widely available in American kitchens in the early twentieth century; how much of a luxury the fresh fruit called for here would have been is harder to say.