No. 3451

Fresh Fruit Ice Creams—Without Eggs or Cooking (creme de Fruits Frais—Sans

Œufs ni Cuisson

For Strawberries, Cherries, Currants and Raspberries.—Add three pints of cream and a pint of milk to a quart of strawberry, cherry, currant or raspberry juice and two pounds of powdered sugar. Melt the sugar, strain the whole through a silk sieve and freeze.

Apricots, Peaches and Nectarines.—To be made with one pint of cream, a pint of the pulp of any of these fruits, taking those thoroughly ripe; break the kernels, peel the nuts, split them in two and infuse in a gill of syrup with the fourth part of a vanilla bean. To the cream and the fruits add ten ounces of powdered sugar and the infusion. Strain through a very fine sieve and freeze.

Pineapple.—Mix a pint of milk and twelve ounces of sugar, also a pint of pineapple juice; strain through a fine sieve and freeze. Instead of using the juice, thin slices may be cut from the pineapple, laid in a vessel and covered with a boiling syrup of thirty-two degrees; strain, cool off and freeze.

← No. 3450 Cinnamon, Ginger or Pumpernickel Rye Bread I Ices & Ice Creams No. 3452 Nougat Ice Cream; Nougat Neapolitan Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer gives four uncooked fruit creams in one entry. Three of them are straightforward Philadelphia-style ice creams; the fourth relies on an infusion of apricot, peach or nectarine kernels, which is the reason for the warning above.

Why the cautionThe stone-fruit version directs you to crack the fruit stones, peel and split the kernels, and infuse them in syrup. Apricot, peach and nectarine kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. The recipe gives no limit on the number of kernels and the infusion is never boiled off, so the dose is unknowable. Do not make that variation; use a current recipe if you want an almond or noyau note.
The other threeThe berry, currant and pineapple versions contain nothing hazardous, provided you use pasteurised cream and milk. Nothing in them is cooked, so dairy quality and cold handling are the whole of the matter.
Powdered sugarIn 1894 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Use superfine or caster sugar. "Melt the sugar" means dissolve it in the juice, not heat it.
A gill and a silk sieveA gill is half a cup. A silk sieve is a very fine bolting cloth; a chinois or a double layer of fine nylon mesh does the same work, and straining genuinely matters here to catch berry seeds and fruit fibre that would freeze into grit.
Syrup of thirty-two degreesThis is a saccharometer (degrees Baume) reading, not a temperature. Thirty-two Baume is a heavy syrup of roughly 60 per cent sugar by weight.
Yield and machine sizeThe berry formula runs to three pints cream, a pint milk and a quart of juice: close to three quarts of mix, sized for a large ice pail at a restaurant. Domestic machines take one to one and a half quarts, so scale to a quarter or a third and churn in batches.
Fresh pineappleBromelain in raw pineapple juice attacks milk protein and can turn the mix bitter and thin if it stands. Mix, strain and freeze without delay, or scald the juice first -- Ranhofer's alternative method, which pours boiling syrup over the slices, goes some way towards this.
Freezing without eggsWith no custard base these mixes have little to hold air or block ice crystals. Churn cold, straight from the refrigerator, and serve the same day; overnight in a modern freezer they set very hard.

A Little History

This entry comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast compendium of the food he served over thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Ranhofer distinguishes carefully between glaces built on a cooked egg custard and these cremes de fruits frais sans oeufs ni cuisson — fresh fruit juice, sugar, cream and nothing else — the style American cooks came to call Philadelphia ice cream, prized because the raw fruit flavour survives undamaged by heat or yolk. The kernel infusion for apricots and peaches follows an old French practice of using the fruit's own stone as a flavouring, the same idea behind noyau and creme de noyaux; the kinship between stone-fruit kernels and bitter almonds was long understood as a matter of taste.