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Fresh Fruit Ice Creams
Prepare fruit by sprinkling sugar over it. Let it stand one hour, press through a sieve, and stir into ice cream when the cream is frozen to a mush. All fruit ice creams are made in substantially the same way, but where seed fruits, such as currants, are used, the carefully strained juice only must be added. This can be put in the freezer with the cream and not reserved until later, as in the case of the mashed fruits. Grated pineapple, with the addition of a little lemon juice, makes a particularly fine fruit cream.
This is a method rather than a fixed formula: it assumes you already have a plain custard or cream base from elsewhere in the chapter and tells you how to turn it into any fruit flavour. The points below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: add fruit at the mush stageFruit purée stirred in while the base is still liquid dilutes it and, if acidic, can curdle the dairy and coarsen the texture. Wait until the machine has brought it to soft-serve thickness, add the purée, then churn only long enough to combine.
- "Frozen to a mush"That is the point where the mixture holds a soft ribbon and mounds on a spoon, roughly the consistency of soft-serve. On a modern countertop churn this is 20 to 30 minutes.
- Sugar and the maceration hourThe hour's standing draws juice and dissolves the sugar so no grittiness carries through. Reckon on about 1/4 cup sugar per pound of fruit, more for sour currants or damsons. Sugar also keeps the fruit from freezing into hard shards, so do not cut it back much.
- Seed fruitsThe text's example is currants; raspberries and blackberries fall in the same class, their pips staying stony in a frozen mixture. Strain through a fine sieve or a doubled cloth; the juice can go in with the base at the start, as the text says, since there is no pulp to weigh it down.
- Fresh pineapple is a real problemRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests milk protein and will leave a custard base thin and unpleasantly bitter within hours. Bring the grated pineapple and its sugar to a simmer for a couple of minutes and cool it before use; canned pineapple has already been heated and is safe to fold in raw.
- RipeningFruit ice cream straight from the churn is soft. Pack it into a chilled container, press paper or wrap against the surface and hold it in the freezer two to four hours before serving.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sweetened puree to a quart of base is a workable proportion; much more and the mixture freezes hard and icy.
- If you are using an ice-and-salt freezerRock salt to cracked ice at about one part in six, and keep the brine drained below the level of the can lid so none seeps in when you open it to add the fruit.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns and the magazines that advertised them, and its cook book belongs to the same project of equipping a middle-class household on a budget. The hand-crank churn, generally credited to Nancy Johnson's 1843 patent, had become cheap, and a commercial ice trade delivered blocks to city kitchens through the summer. Fruit ices were the seasonal payoff of that trade astrapberries in June, currants and raspberries in July, pineapple whenever the fruit boats and later the canneries made it available.