Home › At the Fountain › Strawberry Cream
Strawberry Cream
Four quarts of cream, 2½ pounds of powdered sugar, enough ripe strawberries passed through a sieve to make i quart of juice, mix all together, add a little color if needed, although fresh berries need little coloring. Strain and freeze at once. When mixed together it should not be left standing, as the juice will tend to curdle the cream.
A soda-fountain freezing formula scaled for a commercial dispenser: five quarts of base before churning, meant to be drawn all day. The whole thing hinges on speed between mixing and freezing.
- Do not let it standStrawberry juice is acidic enough to curdle sweet cream on standing, and the recipe says so outright. Have the freezer packed and running before the juice goes in, and get the mix into it at once.
- Scale it downAs written this yields roughly a gallon and a half of frozen cream. A quarter batch is 1 quart cream, 10 oz sugar, and 1 cup strained strawberry juice.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period powdered sugar meant finely milled granulated sugar, not the modern product; modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, so superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match.
- A quart of juiceExpect to need 3 to 4 pounds of ripe berries for a quart of sieved juice. Crushing them with a little of the sugar and letting them sit half an hour draws the juice out before you press them through.
- Sieve, then strainThe sieve removes seeds and pulp from the berries; the recipe then calls for the mixture to be strained again before it goes into the freezer.
- ColoringColorings of the era included cochineal and early coal-tar reds. The recipe treats coloring as optional, noting that fresh berries need little of it.
- FreezingThe original assumes a crank freezer in ice and rock salt, roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part salt. A modern churn works, but chill the mix to refrigerator temperature first or the juice sits warm and acidic while the machine catches up.
- Texture and servingWith no eggs or stabilizer this sets hard and coarsens fast. It is at its best straight from the churn, soft-frozen.
"Cream" on a fountain list meant ice cream, and this recipe works in large quantities: measures in quarts and pounds, and a note about coloring for appearance. The absence of eggs marks it as a Philadelphia-style cream, uncooked and unstabilized. The warning about curdling is part of the recipe itself.