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Strawberry Ice Cream
Add to Philadelphia Ice Cream before freezing one quart of berries which have been washed, hulled, crushed and slightly sweetened.
This is a variation line rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Philadelphia Ice Cream base in front of you. A few things need translating before it works in a modern kitchen.
- What "Philadelphia Ice Cream" meansAn uncooked base of cream (often part milk), sugar and vanilla, with no eggs and no custard-making. If you are substituting a modern recipe, use a no-egg cream base rather than a French-style custard, or the strawberry flavour will read as muted and eggy.
- A quart of berriesMeasured whole and hulled, that is roughly 1 1/2 lb of strawberries, which crush down to about 2 cups of pulp. That is a generous amount of watery fruit for a cream base of this kind, and the added fruit water is likely why this style of strawberry ice cream sets harder than plain.
- "Slightly sweetened"Figure 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar tossed with the crushed berries, left 20 to 30 minutes so the juice draws out. Sugaring the fruit draws its juice and helps keep it from setting into hard, flavourless ice; the cream itself is already sweetened in the base.
- "Before freezing"Written for a hand-crank churn packed with ice and coarse salt, where fruit added at the start had a long slow churn to distribute itself. In a modern machine the batch is done in 20 to 30 minutes; add the crushed berries and their juice to the cold base before churning as written, or hold back half and fold it in during the last two minutes if you want visible fruit.
- Chill firstThe base and the fruit should both be refrigerator-cold before they meet the machine. Room-temperature strawberry juice going into a cream base slows the freeze and coarsens the texture.
- HardeningThe original ice cream would have been repacked in ice and salt to ripen for an hour or two. Transfer to a covered container and hold in the freezer at least two hours; the flavour of the berries improves noticeably in that time.
- YieldDepends on the volume of the base, which this line does not state. Because of the fruit water it will be firm straight from the freezer, so let it sit five minutes before scooping.
Philadelphia-style ice cream — sweetened cream, frozen without eggs — took its name from the city whose confectioners were known for it in the nineteenth century, and by the time cookbooks like this one were printed the term was familiar shorthand in American recipe writing for a custard-free base. Books of this period commonly gave one master recipe followed by a page of short variation lines, as here, and the Frozen Desserts chapter assumes a household with a crank freezer, a supply of block ice and coarse salt, and a cook willing to turn the handle. Strawberries suited the treatment because, unlike peaches, they needed no peeling — just washing, hulling and crushing with a little sugar, exactly as the line says.