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Pear Ice-Cream
Peel twelve mellow pears, cut them in quarters and core, pass them through a fine hair-sieve with one pint of cream, sweeten to taste with sugar, and squeeze in a little lemon juice. Turn the preparation into a freezing-pot working it from the sides to the middle as it freezes. When frozen put the cream in an ice-mould, cover and pack it in ice. Turn the contents of the mould onto a dish when ready to serve.
A no-cook fruit cream of the Philadelphia type: no eggs, no custard, just fruit purée, cream and sugar. Everything depends on the pears being genuinely ripe, since there is no cooking step to develop flavor.
- The hinge: pear ripeness"Mellow" means soft at the neck and fragrant — Bartlett or Comice at the point where they would be a day from spoiling. Underripe pears give a gritty, almost flavorless ice, and no amount of sugar rescues it.
- The hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was the period tool for producing a smooth purée without metal contact. A blender or food processor followed by a pass through a fine-mesh strainer does the same job; the straining matters, as pear flesh carries stone cells that read as grit when frozen.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of cream. Twelve pears will yield several times that in purée -- anywhere from about 4 to 6 cups depending on their size -- so the mixture is heavily fruit-weighted and will freeze hard and icy; cutting the fruit back to about 3 cups gives a scoopable result.
- "Sweeten to taste"Figure 3/4 to 1 cup of sugar for this volume. Taste the unfrozen base and make it slightly too sweet: cold mutes sugar noticeably, and an underswcetened fruit base freezes into a solid block because sugar is what keeps the texture soft.
- Lemon juiceNot only for flavor. Pear purée browns within minutes, so add the juice of half a lemon as you purée rather than after.
- The freezing-potA pewter or tin canister set in a bucket of ice and rock salt, cranked or turned by hand — "working it from the sides to the middle" is scraping the frozen film off the wall and stirring it back in. Any modern ice cream maker performs the same operation.
- Moulding and packingPacking the filled mould in ice and salt is the period method for ripening: it hardens the cream and lets the shape set. A covered container in the freezer for 3 to 4 hours does this. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to unmould.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 quarts as written, serving eight to ten. Best eaten the day it is made; fruit ices without egg or stabilizer turn coarse and icy after a day or two.
Fruit ice creams made without eggs — fruit, cream, sugar, nothing else — were long known in America as Philadelphia-style, and by the time this book appeared the Waldorf was turning them out by the mould for banquet service. The instruction to freeze in a pot and then transfer to a shaped mould packed in ice reflects a kitchen where ice cream was as much an architectural element of the dessert course as a flavor: moulds came in the shapes of fruit, flowers and shells, and the frozen cream was expected to arrive at the table holding its form. Pears were a natural candidate for the treatment, since American orchards supplied Bartletts in quantity through late summer and autumn, and a pear too soft to serve whole was still perfect for the sieve. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name the book carries, was not himself the chef, but the volume records the standard repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century — terse, unmeasured, written for cooks who already knew what a freezing-pot sounded like when the cream was ready.