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Frozen Strawberries and Whipped Cream
Put two tablespoonfuls of crushed loaf-sugar in a saucepan with one quart of water, and boil together for half an hour. Put two quarts of picked ripe strawberries into the syrup, and boil it for fifteen minutes longer. Let the strawberries and syrup cool, then turn them into the freezing-pot, and work them until frozen. Mix in with the frozen strawberries one pint of whipped cream, and serve.
Strawberry and Raspberry Whipped Cream Carefully pick over one-half pound each of strawberries and raspberries, mash, and strain the juice. Sweeten the juice with powdered sugar. Whip one quart of cream to a stiff froth, then mix the sweetened juice with it. Place the mashed fruit on a glass dish, pour the whipped cream over it, and serve.
Two frozen strawberry dishes from the Waldorf's pastry side, both written for a kitchen with an ice-and-salt freezer and a standing supply of cream. The first is closer to a sorbet folded with cream than to ice cream, and the sugar level is the thing to watch.
- The freezing-potThis is the canister of a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, packed round with cracked ice and coarse salt. A domestic ice-cream machine does the same job; "work them until frozen" means churn until the mixture holds a soft-scoop consistency, roughly 20-30 minutes in a home churn.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone or loaf and broken up with nippers, so it had to be crushed before measuring. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, measure for measure.
- The syrup is very leanTwo tablespoons of sugar to a quart of water, even reduced by half an hour's boiling, gives almost no sugar for two quarts of fruit. Sugar is what keeps a frozen mixture scoopable, so as written this sets very hard and icy. Modern sorbet practice runs closer to 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar per quart of liquid; taste the cooled syrup and sweeten it before it goes into the churn.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingStrawberries collapse to something close to jam well before fifteen minutes are up, and much of their fresh aroma goes with the long boil. With market berries, a short simmer, or simply macerating them in the syrup, preserves far more flavour.
- Chill before churning"Let the strawberries and syrup cool" means thoroughly cold, ideally several hours in the refrigerator. A warm mixture in the churn produces large ice crystals and a grainy texture.
- Folding in the creamThe pint of whipped cream goes in after freezing, off the machine, folded rather than stirred. The result is a semifreddo in effect: return it to the freezer for an hour to firm, and serve within a day before the cream loses its lift.
- YieldThe first recipe makes roughly two quarts finished, enough for eight to ten. The second is a fruit fool assembled to order and serves six to eight; strain the juice through a fine sieve or the seeds will speckle the cream.
- The second recipe, sweeteningPowdered sugar dissolves in the raw juice without grittiness, which may be why it is specified. Add the sweetened juice to the whipped cream gradually and stop folding as soon as it is streaked through, or the liquid will slacken the froth.
Oscar Tschirky's kitchen worked in a period when ice cream and iced fruit desserts were a mark of a serious house, because they demanded ice, salt, labour at the crank, and cream in quantity. The Waldorf had all four. What is striking here is how little sugar the first recipe uses: it belongs to an older tradition of water ices built on boiled fruit syrups rather than the custard-based ice creams that came to dominate American menus, and the whipped cream folded in at the end is doing the work of enriching a mixture that would otherwise be an austere ice. Strawberries and raspberries appear together in a good deal of Eastern American cookery of the period, the two fruits overlapping briefly in season; the dish is essentially a fool, a form generally traced to English cookery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dressed up on a glass dish for a hotel dining room.