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Strawberry Ice Cream II
3 pints thin cream 2 boxes strawberries 1¾ cups sugar 2 cups milk 1½ tablespoons arrowroot Wash and hull berries, sprinkle with sugar, let stand one hour, mash, and rub through strainer. Scald one and one-half cups milk; dilute arrowroot with remaining milk, add to hot milk, and cook ten minutes in double boiler; cool, add cream, freeze to a mush, add fruit, and finish freezing.
A custard-free strawberry ice cream thickened with arrowroot, from the era of hand-cranked freezers. It works well in a modern machine, but the volume needs splitting and the fruit needs handling with care.
- Yield and batch sizeThree pints of cream plus two cups of milk and the fruit puree comes to roughly a gallon of finished ice cream, far more than a modern domestic machine holds. Halve or quarter the recipe, or freeze in successive batches.
- Thin creamThis meant cream of roughly 18-20 percent fat, between today's half-and-half and light cream. Modern light cream or half-and-half is the closest match; heavy cream alone risks churning to butter at this ratio.
- A box of strawberriesA berry box of this period was most likely a quart basket, perhaps 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of berries, so two boxes would be roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb, giving a few cups of strained puree.
- ArrowrootUsed here as a stabiliser in place of egg yolks, giving body without custard flavour. Slake it in the cold milk to a smooth slurry before it meets the hot milk, or it will set in lumps.
- The ten minutes in the double boilerArrowroot thickens at a fairly low temperature and loses viscosity if held at a hard boil, so gentle indirect heat is the point of the double boiler. Stir throughout; the mixture should coat a spoon thinly.
- Chill properly before churning"Cool" here should mean thoroughly cold. Refrigerate the arrowroot-milk-cream base several hours or overnight; a warm base overruns badly and freezes coarse.
- Why the fruit goes in lateThe sugar and acid in the strained puree slow freezing, which may be why it goes in only once the base is at the mush stage. Follow this order in a machine as well: churn the dairy base to soft-serve, then add the puree and finish.
- SugarThe strawberries take all of the sugar in the maceration hour, which draws juice and keeps the puree from freezing into hard shards. Do not divert any of it to the milk.
- StorageStarch-set ice cream like this tends to be best the day it is made; after a day or two in the freezer it can turn firm and slightly slick on the tongue.
Farmer gives more than one strawberry ice cream, and this one is the economical option: arrowroot stands in for the egg yolks of a French custard base, stretching expensive cream with milk. Arrowroot, imported from the West Indies, was a standard invalid-cookery and pudding starch in nineteenth-century American kitchens, prized because it thickened clear and had almost no flavour of its own. The hour-long maceration of hulled berries with sugar before mashing and straining is the era's usual treatment for soft fruit in ices, and it does real work: it pulls out juice, dissolves the sugar, and removes the seeds and fibre that would otherwise read as grit in a frozen mixture. Recipes of this scale assume the ice-and-salt tub freezer, which held a gallon or more and was worked by hand for company dinners rather than for a single household serving.