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Apple Ice Cream
Peel, cut and core about two dozen apples; make a stiff marmalade of them; pass through a sieve with 1 quart of cream; sweeten to taste; add a little lemon juice; freeze.
A fountain recipe written for someone who already knew how to run a hand-crank freezer, so the quantities are loose and the method is compressed into one line. The hinge is the apple purée: it must be cooked down thick and cooled completely before it meets the cream, or the mix will be watery and the finished ice cream icy.
- "Stiff marmalade"Not preserve in the citrus sense — it means the apples stewed down to a thick, almost paste-like purée that holds its shape on a spoon. Cook them covered with only a splash of water until collapsed, then uncovered until the excess moisture has driven off.
- Two dozen applesIf the apples are on the small side, figure roughly 5-6 lb; larger fruit will push it higher. Expect several cups of purée before reduction and appreciably less after. Use a variety that breaks down — a McIntosh type or a Bramley — rather than a firm eating apple.
- Sieving with the creamThe recipe passes the purée and the quart of cream through the sieve together, which strains out skin fibre and lumps while thinning the stiff paste enough to move through the mesh. If you prefer to add the cream separately, let the purée cool first, as fruit acid can curdle cream in a hot mix.
- Sweetening'to taste' here probably means a fair amount: roughly 1 to 1½ cups of sugar for this volume. Sugar also affects texture, since there are no eggs or stabiliser — under-sweetened, the mix freezes harder and grainier.
- Lemon juiceOne to two tablespoons. It is there to keep the apple flavour bright and the colour from browning, not to make the mix taste of lemon.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mix thoroughly first, churn until it mounds, then harden in the freezer for at least two hours. Without eggs it will firm up hard; let it stand 10 minutes before scooping.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, or 12 to 14 fountain-sized servings.
Recipes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to read like this one: terse notes for a tradesman rather than instructions for a household. Fruit ice creams were often built the plain way — a purée, cream, sugar, no custard base — which is why apples had to be reduced to a stiff marmalade first, as any surplus water would freeze into shards. Apple was a natural choice in a country that stored barrels of apples through the winter, and the lemon juice does the same job it does in apple pie: it sharpens a fruit that turns flat and slightly muddy once cooked and sweetened.