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Peach Ice Cream
Two quarts of cream, 1 pound of sugar, enough good, ripe peaches mashed through a sieve to make i pint of juice, mixed with a little syrup or fine sugar. This all stirred together and frozen at once. All fruits which contain acid, being of a tart nature, cannot be left standing after being incorporated with the cream, therefore it is advisable to add the juice when the batch is nearly frozen. A little pink coloring is preferred by some ice cream makers; this, of course, is only a matter of taste.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a home one: it assumes a hand- or motor-driven ice-and-salt freezer and a cook working in gallons. It scales down cleanly, but the warning about acid is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: add fruit latePeach purée stirred into sweetened cream and left to stand can thin or grain it, the fruit acid working on the casein so you lose smooth body. Freeze the cream and sugar to a thick, slushy stage first, then pour in the fruit and finish churning. The text says both things: "frozen at once" in its second sentence, then in its third that "it is advisable to add the juice when the batch is nearly frozen."
- YieldTwo quarts of cream plus a pint of purée makes roughly 3 to 3½ quarts of finished ice cream once air is churned in. Halve or quarter it for a domestic machine; home freezers are commonly rated at about 1½ to 2 quarts finished, which means roughly a quart of mix at a time.
- "One pound of sugar"About 2¼ cups granulated, which works out near 16 percent of the mix by weight, in the usual modern range for a fruit ice cream; the "little syrup or fine sugar" stirred into the peaches adds a little more. Sugar is also what keeps it scoopable, so do not cut it much.
- "A pint of juice"Peaches pressed through a sieve give thick purée, not clear juice; a pint means 2 cups of that pulp, which takes roughly 2 to 2½ pounds of ripe fruit. "Fine sugar" in period usage generally means finely granulated or pulverised sugar, presumably for dissolving in cold pulp.
- The creamFountain cream of the period ran around 18 to 20 percent fat. Heavy cream today is 36 percent or more, so use half heavy cream and half whole milk if you want something closer to the original texture rather than a very rich, dense modern ice cream.
- Peeling and browningBlanch the peaches 30 seconds and slip the skins, or the sieve will leave you fighting fuzz and fibre. Toss the pulp with a little lemon juice to stop it going brown while the cream freezes.
- Pink coloringSkip it, or use a drop of beet or vegetable coloring. Turn-of-the-century fountain reds included cochineal and coal-tar dyes of uneven quality, and the peaches themselves give the mix a pale gold that reads perfectly well as peach.
- RipeningThe recipe's "frozen at once" is tied to its own warning that acid fruit cannot stand in cream, not to how long the ice cream keeps. Pack the finished cream and let it firm 2 to 3 hours before serving; the flavour rounds out considerably.
The recipe is addressed to ice cream makers, and it reads accordingly: quantities in quarts and pounds, an eye on cost and color, and a working knowledge of what fails in volume. Peach ice cream belonged to a short summer season before commercial frozen fruit pur s calls for "good, ripe peaches" and a sieve rather than any prepared flavoring. The note on acid and cream is the sort of thing that got learned by ruining a batch: it is sound dairy chemistry, arrived at empirically, and it is still the first thing to know about making ice cream with any tart fruit.