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Frozen Peaches
Pare and divide large, fresh, ripe and juicy peaches, sprinkle over them granulated sugar, freeze them like ice-cream for an hour; remove them just before serving, and sprinkle with a little more sugar. Canned peaches and all kinds of berries may be prepared in the same way. -Mrs. A. G. Wilcox, To KEEP PINE-APPLES.
Pare and cut out the eyes of a ripe pine-apple, strip all the pulp from the core with a silver fork; to a pint of this add a pound of granulated sugar, stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved, put in glass fruit-cans, and turn down the covers as closely as possible. This will keep a long time.
Two things share this entry: a genuinely simple frozen fruit dish, and a note on keeping pineapple that no longer meets any safe preserving standard. The peaches are worth making; the pineapple is not.
- The pineapple note is unsafeRaw pineapple pulp stirred with sugar and sealed cold in glass jars receives no heat process at all — nothing kills the yeasts, molds and bacteria carried in on the fruit. A pound of sugar to a pint of pulp is a heavy sugar pack, but still short of the concentration at which sugar alone reliably prevents spoilage, and the jars are simply "turned down as closely as possible" rather than sealed and processed. For keeping pineapple, use a current tested canning or freezing procedure.
- "Freeze them like ice-cream"In a kitchen of this period that meant ice and rock salt: either the hand-crank freezer or, more likely for whole fruit, a can or mold packed down in the salted ice. The hour is the recipe's own figure and reflects that apparatus rather than any fixed rule.
- What the hour gives youThe result is probably closer to a firm slush than a solid block, though the recipe says nothing about texture. Peach slices left in a modern freezer for an hour will be barely chilled; several hours will freeze them hard enough to be unpleasant to eat straight out. Aim for firm but still yielding, and let hard-frozen fruit stand a few minutes before serving.
- Sugar in two stagesThe first sugar draws juice out of the peaches and lowers the freezing point so they do not set rock solid; the second, added at the table, stays crystalline and gives contrast. Skipping the first sprinkle tends to give icier, blander fruit.
- Peach ripeness"Fresh, ripe and juicy" is the whole recipe. Freezing mutes sweetness and aroma, so underripe supermarket peaches will taste of almost nothing. Fruit that yields to the thumb and smells strongly at the stem end is the minimum.
- Canned peaches and berriesCanned fruit is already packed in syrup and needs little or no extra sugar before freezing; drain it first or the result will be soupy. Berries freeze faster than peach halves — check them well before the hour is up.
- YieldFigure one large peach per person.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the late-nineteenth-century wave of regional compilations built from contributed household receipts, which is why this page carries a signature — Mrs. A. G. Wilcox — and why a fruit-freezing note runs straight into an unrelated method for keeping pineapple. Frozen fruit desserts of this kind became practical for ordinary households only after the hand-crank ice-cream freezer spread in the second half of the century and the commercial ice trade made cut ice cheap in Southern towns during summer. Peaches were the obvious candidate: Georgia and the Carolinas were building a serious peach industry in exactly these decades, and the fruit is at its best for only a few weeks. The pineapple entry points the other way, toward the anxious business of preserving imported tropical fruit — and it does so at a time when screw-top and Mason-type jars and boiling-water processing were already in general use, which is precisely why this uncooked method looks careless. The confident promise that it "will keep a long time" is the sort of claim that later food-safety guidance would spend decades correcting.