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Concord Cream
1 pint cream Lemon or fresh lime juice 1¼ cups grape juice 1/2 cup heavy cream Pistachio nuts, finely chopped ⅓ cup sugar Mix cream, grape juice, and sugar. Add lemon or lime juice to taste. Freeze, and serve in glasses. Garnish with heavy cream beaten until stiff, sweetened, and flavored. Sprinkle cream with nuts.
A frozen grape-and-cream dessert closer to a semifreddo or slushy parfait than to a churned ice cream. It is meant to be spooned from a glass, not scooped from a tub.
- Grape juiceUnsweetened Concord grape juice is most likely what the recipe intends — dark, musky, and quite tart. Sweetened bottled juice will push the mixture past the point where the sugar reads as balanced; taste before adding the full half cup.
- The acid is the hingeLemon or lime juice is not decoration. Grape juice and cream alone taste flat and slightly cloying once frozen, since cold blunts sweetness and aroma; start with a tablespoon and add until the fruit reads clearly.
- CurdlingAcid plus cream will thicken and can look broken if it sits at room temperature. Mix cold, freeze promptly, and stir well before pouring into the freezing container.
- Freezing methodThe recipe says only "Freeze." A kitchen of the period would most likely have used a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer, which produced a soft, granular result. An ice cream machine churned 20-25 minutes will give a smoother version. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which yields something granita-like.
- Serve softWith no eggs, no stabilizer and a high water content from the juice, this sets rock hard in a modern deep freezer. Serve straight from churning, or let a frozen batch stand 10-15 minutes before spooning into glasses.
- "Flavored" whipped creamThe garnish cream is the separate half cup, whipped, sweetened, and flavored to taste — vanilla, a spoonful of sherry, or a drop of almond extract would all suit.
- PistachiosChop them fine and use unsalted, unroasted nuts if you can find them; the green against the purple is the whole point of the garnish.
- YieldAbout a quart of frozen mixture, enough for six small glasses served as written.
The Concord grape was developed in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-nineteenth century and became the defining American grape for juice and jelly — a cold-hardy, thick-skinned, intensely aromatic fruit that most Europeans would not recognize as wine grape material at all. Unfermented grape juice was widely available in bottles by the turn of the century, promoted in part by temperance-minded households as a respectable alternative to wine, and it turns up throughout American cookbooks of the period in punches, gelatines and frozen desserts. A cookbook naming a dish for Concord is claiming a local ingredient, and the recipe belongs to a whole class of light water-and-cream ices, lighter fare than a heavy dessert.