Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Green Coloring
Green Coloring
1 can peaches Mix first four ingredients, and add junket tablets dissolved in cold water. Turn into a pudding-dish and let stand until set. Add flavoring and coloring. Freeze, mould, and serve garnished with halves of peaches, filling cavities with halves of blanched almonds. Turn peaches into a saucepan, add one-third cup sugar, and cook slowly until syrup is thick. Cool before garnishing ice cream. 1 quart cream ¾ cup sugar Few grains salt
A frozen junket — cream set with rennet, then churned and moulded, with a canned-peach garnish cooked down in syrup. The method is simple, but rennet only works within a narrow temperature window, and that is where the dish stands or falls.
- Junket tabletsThese are rennet tablets, still sold for making junket and soft cheese. One tablet sets about 1 quart of dairy; crush it and dissolve in a tablespoon of cold water before stirring it in.
- The temperature hingeRennet works best at about body heat. Warm the cream and sugar to roughly 98-100F before adding the dissolved tablet; too much heat inactivates the enzyme and the mixture will not set, and cold cream will simply sit there.
- Do not stir once it is inPour into the dish and leave it absolutely still for 10-15 minutes. Any movement while the curd is forming gives a grainy, whey-streaked set. (The recipe adds the flavoring and coloring after the junket has set.)
- Reading the quantitiesThe sugar is three-quarters of a cup, against 1 quart of cream and a few grains of salt. Once the junket is set, break it up and churn it in an ice-cream machine as you would any custard base.
- Moulding"Mould" here means packing the churned cream into a metal form and burying it in a mix of crushed ice and rock salt for two to three hours to firm. A loaf pan in the freezer, covered with plastic against the surface, does the same job.
- The peachesA modern can of peach halves in syrup needs only to be simmered gently with the third cup of sugar until the liquid coats a spoon, 10–15 minutes. Cool completely before it touches the ice cream or it will melt the surface.
- ColoringSpinach was one period source of a green coloring for creams; leaf-green vegetable coloring served the same end. A few drops of modern food coloring goes a very long way in a quart of cream -- start with two.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten with the peach and almond garnish.
Junket -- milk or cream set to a soft curd with rennet, the same enzyme used to make cheese -- was a staple of nineteenth-century nurseries and sickrooms, valued as something bland, sweet and easy to digest. Commercial rennet tablets came within reach of ordinary households in the later nineteenth century and made junket a standing item in American cookbooks. Freezing the set curd rather than serving it plain may well have been a way of dressing up a plain invalid dish for the table, and it belongs with the philadelphia creams and frozen puddings of the same era. The canned peaches are equally of their moment: by the turn of the century commercially canned California fruit was cheap and reliable year-round, and garnishing a moulded cream with it was an easy show of plenty.