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Strawberry Ice-Cream
Put one pound of strawberries into a basin with sufficient crushed loaf sugar to sweeten, add the strained juice of one or two lemons, and pass the whole through a sieve into another basin. Add a little cochineal to color, two breakfast cupfuls of cream, and more sifted sugar if required. Turn the preparation into the freezer, work it well, place it in a mould packed in ice, let it set, then turn it out, and it is ready for use.
An uncooked, eggless ice cream of the Philadelphia type: fruit, sugar, cream, frozen. The whole success of it rests on how finely the fruit is broken down and how much sugar goes in.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones or blocks and crushed at home; ordinary granulated or superfine sugar is the direct substitute. "Sifted sugar" later in the recipe means the same sugar sieved fine so it dissolves in cold cream.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, usually reckoned at somewhere around 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two cupfuls of cream against a pound of fruit gives roughly a quart of finished ice cream.
- Sweeten generously"Sufficient to sweeten" is doing real work here. Sugar is what keeps a no-egg ice cream from freezing into a solid block, so a cold mixture should taste slightly too sweet before it goes into the machine; expect around 6 oz of sugar to a pound of berries.
- The sieve is the whole texturePassing the sweetened, macerated fruit through a sieve removes the seeds and the fibrous cores that otherwise freeze into grit. A blender alone will not do it; press the purée through a fine mesh afterwards.
- CochinealA red colouring made from dried scale insects, sold then as a liquid or powder and still available as carmine. Strawberry mixtures do lose their brightness once macerated and mixed with cream, which is likely why colour was wanted; it can simply be left out, or a spoonful of the reserved pur"index"e cooked down used instead.
- "Turn into the freezer"The freezer is the hand-cranked pail with an inner canister set in ice and rock salt, not a compartment of a refrigerator. Any modern churn does the same job; the instruction to "work it well" means keep it moving until it thickens to soft-serve.
- Moulding and settingPacking the filled mould in ice and salt is the old way of hardening the ice cream through, equivalent to two to three hours in a freezer. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
- The lemon is vague"One or two lemons" against a pound of fruit is a wide range. Start with one, taste the cold base, and add more only if the strawberries are flat; too much acid against cold cream reads sour rather than bright.
Strawberry ice cream in this style — no custard, no cooking, just fruit purée folded into raw cream and frozen — is what Americans came to call Philadelphia ice cream, and it was the plainer of the two traditions running through nineteenth-century kitchens, the other being the French egg-yolk custard. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, when hotel kitchens still made ice cream in salt-and-ice pails and moulded it in hinged pewter forms shaped as fruits, baskets and flowers for the dessert service. The cochineal is a reminder that colouring food was ordinary practice rather than deception: cooks expected a strawberry ice to look emphatically pink, and cochineal, imported from Mexico and Central America and reaching Europe as a dyestuff in the sixteenth century, though its culinary use is less securely dated, was the standard red in the pantry long before coal-tar dyes arrived.