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Frozen Peaches
One basket ripe, sound peaches, skinned, the pits taken out and quartered, a syrup of 5 quarts of water and 10 pounds of sugar, put the peaches into the boiling syrup and let them stand over night to become soft and absorb some of the syrup. This should be observed carefully; if the peaches don't absorb the syrup they will be as hard as stone when frozen. Strain and put in freezer to freeze the juice; when hard enough, lightly work in the peaches, being careful not to mash them, repack the can and let stand for an hour.
A soda-fountain fruit ice rather than a sorbet: the peaches are candied in heavy syrup overnight, then folded into the frozen juice so the fruit stays in recognizable pieces. The overnight steep is the whole point of the recipe.
- The hinge: the overnight soakSugar has to replace enough water in the peach flesh to keep it from freezing solid. Skip or shorten the steep and you get ice pellets in a slush, exactly as the original warns. Read "over night" as roughly eight to twelve hours in the syrup as it cools; refrigerate the pan once it has cooled if your kitchen is warm.
- "One basket" is not a usable measureFruit baskets of the period ran from a 4-quart climax basket (about 6 lb of fruit) up to a half-bushel (about 24 lb), so the fruit quantity here is unknowable. Work from the syrup instead: 5 quarts water to 10 lb sugar is roughly 20 lb of syrup. To scale down, hold the original ratio, which is close to equal weights: 1 cup water to about 8 oz sugar (a generous cup and an eighth).
- That syrup is deliberately heavyTwo pounds of sugar per quart of water works out to nearly equal weights of sugar and water, close to 50 percent sugar. Do not thin it; the density is doing the anti-freeze work. It will taste aggressively sweet in the pan and correct once frozen and cold.
- "Freezer" and "can"Both refer to a hand- or motor-cranked ice cream freezer: a metal can turning inside a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt. A modern churn or an ice cream maker canister does the same job. "Repack the can" means bury it again in fresh ice and salt to ripen, not to keep churning.
- Freeze the juice alone firstStrain the syrup off the fruit and churn only the liquid. Adding the quarters early shreds them; they go in at the end, folded through with a paddle or spatula while the ice is still soft enough to accept them.
- Skinning the peachesFully ripe peaches will usually slip their skins after 30-40 seconds in boiling water and a cold-water dip. Firmer or less ripe fruit has to be pared with a knife, and clingstones, common in the period, make the pitting and quartering harder work.
- The hour of standingThis is ripening, and it matters here because the fruit pieces are still warmer and softer than the ice around them. An hour packed in ice and salt, or in a freezer at about 0F, evens out the texture and firms the quarters.
- Yield and serviceThe full batch is fountain-scale: the syrup alone comes to something like two gallons before the fruit goes in. The leftover candying syrup keeps under refrigeration for sodas or for the next batch.
Soda-fountain and confectioners' manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried sections on "frozen fruits" -- peaches, pineapple, strawberries -- which sat between a water ice and a preserve and were dispensed by the dish at the counter alongside ice cream and phosphates. The technique comes out of the confectioner's trade: candy the fruit in a dense syrup so that the sugar in the flesh keeps the pieces tender at freezing temperature, the same principle behind glace fruit. Peaches were the obvious summer candidate in the United States, shipped by rail from growing regions such as Georgia, Delaware and Michigan and sold to shops by the basket rather than by weight, which is why the recipe measures fruit by the basket and sugar by the pound. Recipes of this kind assumed an ice-and-rock-salt freezer in the back room; mechanical refrigeration spread through the fountain trade largely in the 1920s and 1930s.