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Wild Plum Ice
As good in its turn as pineapple or lemon. The plums must not be cooked, however. 1 pound of wild plums--ripe and sweet, red or yellow. 1 pound of sugar. 1 quart of water. 4 whites of eggs.
Mash the plums and sugar together in a bright pan, add the water and rub the pulp and syrup through a strainer into a freezer. Freeze, add the the whipped whites and beat up as usual. It makes a cream-white ice, that may be colored with a little boiled red plum syrup or otherwise.
Wild plum ice cream of sweet plums may also be made by the directions given for pineapple ice cream. The flavor is very good.
The cook wanted to make a tapioca custard ice but the appearance of it on the bill of fare bothered him. He knew it was good, for sometimes the tapioca cup-custard had become half frozen where it was set in ice to get cold, and it was extremely rich. He knew there was such a thing as iced pudding, but then it might be taken to mean only pudding iced over like cake, and besides iced pudding should be of two parts, cream and fruit. This was at a Sulphur Springs down in a warm State where they had ices of some sort for dinner every day during three-fourths of the year, and two kinds on Sundays, and the repetitions of ice cream and lemon she bet became extremely tiresome. So he concluded to put it on the bill of fare frozen tapioca pudding. But the people who ate the dinners were not tired of ices, and the eating of them had become a sort of habit, and to have left out the ices would have seemed as strange as to have left out coffee or bread. And when the young colonel, who was always ready to penetrate a witicism remarked significantly that if there was one thing he did love it was ice cream, and if there was one thing he did despise it was cold pudding, everybody looked all the bill of fare, and the young ladies said, oh, dear! But the brig dier general said he had half a mind to try it and see what frozen pudding was, and the old lady said he needn't be a bit afraid for everything they made there was good. But while they were talking the judge, who was wanted at the courthouse again, had had his brought in, and he spoke up and said they couldn't fool him, it was ice cream. Then the young ladies said again how very, very ridiculous, and they might bring them a little, please. And it ended badly, for through this unwonted advertising of the article it gave out and there was not over half enough to go round. But, begging the judges pardon, it was not ice cream, now what was it?
A water ice, not a cream: fruit pulp, sugar syrup and whipped egg white, churned in a hand-crank freezer. The egg white is the problem, and it is the reason this one belongs on the page rather than in the freezer.
- The raw egg whitesFour whites go in after the ice is frozen and are never heated at any stage. Uncooked shell egg, white included, carries a Salmonella risk, and a sugar-and-water ice at freezing temperature neither kills the organism nor stops it surviving. Freezing preserves pathogens; it does not destroy them. If you want a plum ice, work from a current recipe written for modern egg handling.
- Why the whites are there at allBeaten white was one nineteenth-century way to keep a water ice light and pale — it aerates the mix and helps mask the coarse crystals a hand freezer leaves behind. Modern sorbets get a similar lightness from sugar concentration and faster churning.
- A "bright pan"A well-scoured pan; a bright tinned or enamelled surface rather than bare iron, which can discolour acid fruit. Any nonreactive bowl answers the same purpose.
- "Into a freezer"A pail-and-canister ice cream freezer, packed with cracked ice and coarse salt and turned by hand. "Beat up as usual" most likely means working the paddle after the additions rather than switching to a whisk.
- The plumsWild plums here are the American species — Prunus americana and its relatives — small, thin-skinned, with a large stone and a tart skin. Mash the flesh only; the stones should be lifted out whole rather than crushed, as plum kernels contain cyanogenic compounds.
- Sugar and waterOne pound of sugar to one quart of water is about 2¼ cups to 4 cups. It is a sweet mix by design; the sugar is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than solid.
- YieldNot stated. The syrup and pulp come to roughly two quarts before the whites are added.
This is generally traced to Jessup Whitehead's late-nineteenth-century trade manuals, written for the men running hotel and resort kitchens rather than for home cooks, which explains the long anecdote trailing off the end of the recipe. The setting he describes — a Sulphur Springs hotel in a warm state, ices at dinner nine or ten months of the year, two kinds on Sunday — is the American mineral-spring resort at its height, where a daily ice was as fixed a part of the bill of fare as bread, and where the kitchen's real problem was not technique but monotony. Wild plums fit that economy: Prunus americana and its kin grew in thickets across the Midwest and upper South, were gathered rather than bought, and served as good in their turn as pineapple or lemon. The closing riddle answers itself from the paragraph above it — the judge was eating the cook's frozen tapioca pudding, rich enough from the custard base that a courtroom-bound diner took it for ice cream.