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Fresh-Fruit Ice-Cream
Prepare fruit by sprinkling sugar over it. Let it stand one , hour, press through a coarse sieve and stir into American icecream when the cream is frozen to a mush.
If seed fruits, such as currants, are used, strain through a fine or a sieve or a piece of cheese-cloth and use the juice only. The juice can be put into the freezer with the cream and not served until later, as in the case of the mashed fruits.
Grated pineapple wtih the addition of a little lemon-juice makes a particularly fine fruit cream.
This is a method rather than a formula: it tells you how to fold fresh fruit into a base recipe printed elsewhere in the chapter. The quantities are left to the cook, so treat the notes below as the guardrails.
- The hinge: add fruit at the mush stageThe recipe is explicit that the purée goes in only once the cream is frozen to a mush. Fold the purée through then and continue churning only long enough to distribute it; fruit stirred into the liquid base can separate, and whole pieces added early tend to sink and freeze hard.
- "American ice-cream"The plain cream-and-sugar base printed elsewhere in the chapter; the term is not defined on this page. Any modern uncooked cream-and-sugar base works; figure roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of fruit purée per quart of base.
- Sugaring the fruitThe hour's standing with sugar is maceration: it draws out juice and, more importantly, lowers the freezing point of the fruit so it does not set rock-hard in the finished cream. Allow about 1/4 cup sugar per cup of prepared fruit, and remember this sugar is in addition to what sweetens the base.
- "Seed fruits"Currants, raspberries, blackberries and the like. Straining out the pips through cheesecloth is worth the trouble; frozen seeds are unpleasantly hard and gritty.
- Fresh pineapple and dairyRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down milk protein and turns a cream base thin and faintly bitter within hours. Scald the grated pineapple and its juice briefly, then cool it before folding in, or use canned crushed pineapple, which has already been heat-treated.
- The garbled sentenceThe line about juice going "into the freezer with the cream and not served until later" appears corrupt as printed. The likeliest reading is that thin juice can be churned in with the base from the start, where mashed pulp has to wait until the cream is partly frozen, but the text as it stands will not quite bear that out.
- Freezer and saltWritten for a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. A modern machine handles it; the base and the fruit purée should both be thoroughly chilled before they go in.
- Ripening and yieldPeriod ice-cream was repacked and left to "ripen" an hour or two, which firms the texture and rounds the flavour. A quart of base plus fruit gives about six modest servings; eat it within a couple of days, as fruit ices without egg turn icy quickly.
Fruit ice-creams belong to the moment when mechanical churning made frozen desserts a routine summer dish rather than a confectioner's showpiece. Hand-crank freezers with an inner can and a paddle were in wide household use from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and by then the ice-cream chapter was standard in any general household manual. The note on pineapple is a small piece of practical wisdom arrived at by trial; cooks knew the fruit spoiled a cream long before bromelain was identified as the reason.