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Strawberry Ice Cream
2 quarts of strawberries--red ripe and sweet. 2 pounds of sugar. 2 quarts of cream.
Cover the fruit with the sugar and mash them together and rub the fruit and syrup through a seive into a bowl, adding a cupful of water to the pulp at last. Half freeze the cream by itself and then add the strawberry syrup and finish the freezing as usual.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooked custard, just fruit, sugar and cream. The whole method hinges on when the fruit goes in.
- Half-freeze the cream firstThis is the instruction that matters. Why the author separates the stages is not stated; churning the plain cream to a thick soft-serve stage before folding in the syrup keeps the fruit flavour bright and the mixture smooth. Fold in the syrup and finish the freezing.
- YieldTwo quarts of cream plus the sweetened sieved fruit (call it a quart to a quart and a half) makes something in the region of a gallon of finished ice cream, enough for 16 to 20 generous servings. Most domestic machines take 1.5 to 2 quarts of base at a time, so plan on churning in batches or scaling the recipe down.
- The sugar is not optionalTwo pounds is about 4.5 cups, a high proportion even by the standards of eggless ice cream. Sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the texture scoopable; cut it substantially and you get a hard, icy block.
- Macerate before mashing"Cover the fruit with the sugar and mash them together" works best if the sugar sits on the hulled berries for an hour first. The sugar draws out juice, so more flavor passes through the sieve and less stays behind in the pulp.
- Sieve, then rinse the pulpThe cup of water added to the pulp "at last" is a rinse to recover the syrup clinging to the seeds and fiber. Press through a fine-mesh sieve rather than a food mill if you want the seeds out entirely; strawberry seeds are unpleasant in frozen cream.
- Cream'Cream' in a nineteenth-century American kitchen meant unhomogenized cream skimmed from the top of the milk, of variable richness. Modern heavy or whipping cream is the usual substitute. A mix of three parts heavy cream to one part whole milk gives a lighter result.
- Freezing "as usual"Freezing 'as usual' -- The original leaves the apparatus unstated, presumably an ice-and-salt freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt; period instructions commonly give something like three parts ice to one of salt. Any modern churn does the same job; the base and the bowl should both be thoroughly chilled before you start.
- RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft. Pack it into a chilled container, press parchment onto the surface and hold it in the freezer for two to four hours to firm up. Without eggs or stabilizers it hardens fast in a home freezer, so let it sit out five to ten minutes before scooping.
Ice cream made from nothing but cream, sugar and fruit came to be called Philadelphia-style, distinguishing it from the egg-thickened French custard bases that dominated European confectionery. It is the simpler of the two approaches, and American cookbooks of the nineteenth century favored it heavily. The recipe's casual "finish the freezing as usual" is a reminder of how ordinary the hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer had become in American households by the late 1800s, once the commercial ice trade made packed ice cheap in cities through the summer months. Strawberries, the first substantial fruit of the season and impossible to keep, were the natural thing to turn into ice cream the week they came in.