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Peach Sherbet
2 cups chopped peaches 2 cups cream 1 cup sugar
½ teaspoon almond extract
Select mellow peaches, peel and chop fine; add sugar and let stand in icebox one hour; then rub through a coarse sieve, add cream and extract (vanilla or lemon may be used) and freeze.
A churn-frozen peach cream, written when "freeze" meant an hour of cranking in an ice-and-salt bucket. Nothing here needs changing except the equipment and a clearer sense of what the cream should be.
- What "freeze" meansThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20-25 minutes, then firm it in the freezer for two hours.
- CreamPeriod recipe "cream" was not a standardised product and was often thinner than today's heavy cream. Use heavy cream, or half heavy and half whole milk if you want it lighter, bearing in mind that the lower the fat, the harder and icier the result.
- Sherbet, in this book's senseBy current usage a sherbet contains only a little dairy. This is a Philadelphia-style ice cream in everything but name -- fruit, sugar, cream, no eggs, no cooked custard.
- The maceration is the hingeThe maceration -- The hour with sugar in the icebox draws juice from the peaches and dissolves the sugar, which makes the fruit easier to rub through the sieve and puts the sugar into solution before freezing. Worth doing as written.
- Sieving"Rub through a coarse sieve" gives a pulpy purée with some texture left. A food mill or a few short pulses in a blender does the same; a long blend makes it foamy and pale.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoon in a quart of base is assertive by modern palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste the unfrozen base -- cold mutes flavour, so it should taste slightly too sweet and too strong before churning.
- Peaches"Mellow" means fully ripe and fragrant, freestone for easy chopping. Underripe fruit gives no perfume and the sugar has nothing to draw out; if the peaches are bland, a squeeze of lemon sharpens them.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six. Eggless ice creams stiffen and turn icy fast, so this is best eaten the day it is made.
Peach was a popular American ice-cream flavour of the nineteenth century, and it survived in books like this because peaches were a summer glut that had to be used within days. The eggless formula -- fruit, sugar, cream, extract -- is what confectioners called Philadelphia style, distinguished from the cooked custard "French" base; it is faster, cheaper, and tastes more directly of the fruit. The note that vanilla or lemon may be substituted for almond is a reminder that the almond extract is doing period work: a trace of benzaldehyde reads as intensified stone fruit, since peach kernels and bitter almonds share the same aromatic compound, and cooks had long used the kernels themselves for the purpose. That this appears among "Cooking Hints and Recipes" in a menu book, rather than as part of a full bill of fare, suggests it was expected to be slotted in wherever a hostess needed a cold sweet in August.