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Peach Ice-Cream
Peel six ripe peaches and boil them in one-fourth pint of water till dissolved; pass the pulp through a fine hair-sieve, then mix with it one pint of syrup, one pint of thick cream, a few drops of essence of kernels, and color it lightly with a little cochineal. Put the preparation in a freezing-pot and work it till frozen. Fill a plain mould with the peach ice, put the lid on, and pack it in ice. When ready to serve, dip the mould in tepid water, wipe it and turn the cream out onto a dish.
A straightforward custard-free peach ice, written for a kitchen with a hand-cranked freezer and a supply of block ice. The conversions matter more than the technique here.
- One-fourth pint of waterThat is half a cup. It is only enough to keep the peaches from scorching as they break down; the fruit will give up plenty of its own juice.
- "Syrup" means stock syrupA pre-made sugar syrup, usually somewhere between equal parts sugar and water and two parts sugar to one. A pint of that is a great deal of sugar for six peaches, so taste the mixture before churning and cut the syrup back if your fruit is already sweet.
- Essence of kernelsBitter almond flavouring, historically distilled from peach or apricot kernels. Use a few drops of commercial almond extract. Do not attempt to make the essence yourself by crushing and steeping the peach stones, as raw kernels carry amygdalin, which releases cyanide.
- CochinealA red colouring made from dried scale insects, sold then as liquid or as carmine powder. Carmine is still available, or leave the colour out; the point was only to counter the drab beige of cooked peach.
- Chill before freezingThe recipe does not say it, but the boiled purée must be cold before the cream goes in and before it reaches the machine. A warm mixture churns to coarse ice crystals.
- Freezing-potAn ice-and-salt churn. Any modern ice-cream maker does the job; churn it just to the thickness of soft-serve and no further.
- Moulding and packingPacking the filled mould in ice for an hour or two is the old ripening step, and it is what makes the ice firm enough to unmould cleanly. The freezer at its coldest setting does the same. Dipping in tepid water for a second or two is right; longer and the surface melts to slush.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, but his 1896 Cook Book gathered the house repertoire, and frozen creams were a large part of it: a fashionable New York hotel of the 1890s served ices at formal dinners, often turned out of moulds shaped as fruits, baskets and pyramids. The unmoulding instruction here is the whole reason for the recipe's shape, since the dish was meant to arrive at the table looking like something other than a scoop. Two details suggest roughly when it belongs. The ice trade, cut from northern lakes in winter and stored in sawdust, was one of the things that made this possible in July, alongside the mechanical ice plants already supplying the city by the 1890s, and cochineal and bitter-almond essence were the standard pair for making cooked stone fruit look and taste more like itself, a practice later largely abandoned.