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Strawberry Ice-Cream
Sprinkle strawberries with sugar, wash well and rub through a sieve; to a pint of the juice add half a pint of good cream, make it very sweet; freeze, and when beginning to set, stir in lightly one pint of cream whipped, and lastly a handful of whole strawberries :
sweetened. It may then be put in a mold and imbedded in ice, or kept in the freezer; or mash with a potato-pounder in an earthen bowl one quart of strawberries with one pound of sugar; rub it through a colander, add one quart of sweet cream and freeze. Or, if not in the strawberry season, use the French bottled strawberries (or any canned ones), mix juice with half a pint of cream, sweeten and freeze; when partially set add whipped cream and strawberries.
An uncooked fruit-and-cream ice, closer to a frozen mousse than to a custard ice cream. Two things carry it: enough sugar, and folding the whipped cream in at the right moment.
- Sweeten past what tastes right"Make it very sweet" is the hinge. Cold mutes sugar and acid alike, so a mixture that tastes correct at room temperature will read thin and sour frozen. Figure roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar per pint of strained juice, tasting before it goes into the machine.
- Quantities of fruitA pint of sieved juice takes a good deal of fruit; plan on upwards of a quart of hulled strawberries, more if they are dry or underripe. Sprinkling with sugar first draws the juice out and makes the sieving easier.
- Wash first, not secondThe original has you sugar the berries, then wash them, which reverses sensible order and rinses away the syrup you just drew. Hull and rinse the fruit, drain it well, then sugar and macerate for half an hour.
- Rubbing through a sieveThe point is to leave the seeds behind. A fine-mesh sieve and a stiff spatula do it; a blender followed by straining is faster.
- FreezingWritten for a pail freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which churns slowly and takes 20 to 40 minutes. In a modern machine the base should be refrigerator-cold before it goes in, and "beginning to set" means the texture of thick soft-serve.
- The whipped creamFolding a pint of whipped cream into a partly frozen base is what makes this light rather than dense. Whip to soft peaks only — stiff cream breaks into lumps when it hits the cold mixture — and fold by hand off the machine, then finish in the freezer for two to three hours.
- Whole berriesBerries frozen whole turn into ice pellets. Halve or quarter them and toss with a little sugar first, or macerate them briefly in liqueur, which keeps them from freezing solid.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten. With no eggs or stabilizers it hardens fast and coarsens within a day or two; it is at its best a few hours after churning.
Strawberry was among the standard flavors of nineteenth-century American ice cream, alongside vanilla and lemon, and cookbooks of the period give it both as a cooked custard and as a plain fruit-and-cream mixture like this one. The plain version depended entirely on the fruit, which is why it sits in a chapter that assumes a June glut of berries and a well-stocked icehouse — domestic ice was cheap by then, packed in sawdust and sold through the summer for exactly this sort of thing. The hand-crank pail freezer with an inner can and a dasher, generally traced to a patent by Nancy Johnson in the 1840s, made ices a family dessert rather than a confectioner's specialty, and by the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared, a chapter of them was standard. The instruction to rub the fruit through a sieve is a reminder that strawberry seeds were considered a defect in a dessert meant to be smooth; the recipe ends by calling for a handful of whole strawberries stirred in last.