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Pineapple Ice Cream
Make the same as directed in the preceding receipt with 2 quarts of rich cream instead of water, and use no eggs. Pineapple syrup or pulp poured into cream will immediately curdle it. The cream must be nearly frozen first and then the pineapple added to it and the freezing finished.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — cream, sugar and fruit, no eggs and no cooked custard. The recipe is a variation note, so it assumes you have the preceding pineapple water ice in front of you.
- The hingeAdd the pineapple only when the cream is nearly frozen, exactly as written. Pineapple is acidic enough to curdle sweetened cream on contact; once the mix is half-frozen it is cold and thick enough that the cream no longer breaks sharply.
- Fresh versus cannedFresh pineapple also carries bromelain, a protease that digests dairy protein and leaves a bitter, thin finish over time. Canned or briefly cooked pineapple has had the enzyme destroyed by heat and is the safer choice for flavour stability; the acidity remains either way.
- Missing quantitiesThe sugar, fruit and flavouring all come from the preceding receipt, which is not on this page, so the proportions here are genuinely incomplete. For a workable Philadelphia base, use the ratio your own machine's manual gives and treat this text as a technique note rather than a formula.
- "Rich cream"In this period this would have been unhomogenised cream skimmed from raw milk, of variable and generally high fat content. Modern heavy cream is the closest equivalent; a mix of heavy cream and whole milk gives a lighter body.
- Freezer capacityTwo quarts of cream will churn up to appreciably more than two quarts finished, well beyond a domestic machine; many countertop churns hold only a quart or two. Scale down or work in batches.
- Hand-crank equivalentsThe original assumes a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, cranked until the dasher stalls. In a modern machine, "nearly frozen" is the point where the paddle leaves a clear track and the mixture holds a soft peak.
- RipeningIce cream made without eggs sets hard and grainy in a deep freeze. Transfer to a covered container and let it temper for a while before serving, and eat it the same day.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than home cooks, and its entries are terse cross-references to one another instead of standalone recipes. An eggless ice cream of this kind was known in the trade as Philadelphia ice cream, distinguished from the French or custard style thickened with yolks. Pineapple itself moved from luxury to commonplace in this period as canning and steam shipping brought the fruit north in quantity, and the curdling problem the author flags here was a familiar frustration in commercial kitchens, whatever the state of knowledge about the enzymes and acids responsible.