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Peach Ice-Cream
1 pint milk 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons water 1 cup sugar 2 egg-yolks 1 cup heavy cream 2 cups peach-pulp and juice Make custard as directed for vanilla ice-cream. When cool, add the peach-pulp and juice, and freeze.
A flour-thickened custard base of the sort that dominated American home ice-cream making before commercial stabilizers. The instruction that matters most is temperature: the peach pulp is acidic, and it must go into a fully cooled custard or the base will curdle and turn grainy.
- The custard, in modern termsThis page only says "make custard as directed for vanilla ice-cream," and those directions are not given here; the two tablespoons of water almost certainly indicate the flour is to be slaked. Working it as a modern cook would: scald the pint of milk, slake the 2 tablespoons flour smooth in the 2 tablespoons cold water, stir it into the milk and cook until thickened, then temper into the beaten yolks and sugar and cook to about 170-175F. Strain it, then chill it thoroughly - ideally overnight, not merely to room temperature.
- Why the flour is thereTwo tablespoons of flour in a pint of milk is a starch stabilizer, doing the work a modern recipe gets from more egg yolks or from commercial gums. It binds free water and keeps the churned ice-cream from turning coarse and icy after a day in the freezer. Cook it out fully or the base tastes pasty.
- Peach-pulp and juiceTwo cups means roughly 3 to 5 ripe medium peaches, blanched 30 seconds and slipped out of their skins, then mashed rather than pureed smooth - a little texture survives freezing better than a slurry. Underripe supermarket peaches will taste of nothing; ripen them on the counter until fragrant and yielding.
- Sugar for the fruitThe recipe's one cup of sugar goes into the custard and none is called for on the fruit. If the peaches are tart, toss the mashed fruit with 2 to 4 tablespoons more sugar and let it stand half an hour before adding; unsweetened fruit freezes hard and reads sour against the rich base.
- The cream is unwhippedThe cream -- The recipe lists the cup of heavy cream without saying how to treat it. Simplest is to stir it in cold and liquid before churning; the vanilla ice-cream directions this recipe refers to are not reproduced here, so whether the book meant it whipped cannot be told from the page.
Peach was a common flavour in early American frozen desserts; Thomas Jefferson's household and the early Philadelphia confectioners both worked with iced and fruit creams. The flour-and-yolk custard stretches two yolks and one cup of cream across roughly a quart and a half of mixture while still giving a smooth body. It belongs to the era of the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer and of summer fruit eaten in season.