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An Excellent Dessert
Mrs. J. Young Scammon."
One can or twelve large peaches, two coffee-cups of sugar, one pint of water and the whites of three eggs; break the peaches with and stir all the ingredients together; freeze the whole into form; beat the eggs to a froth.
A frozen peach ice thickened with raw egg white — a common nineteenth-century way to give a water ice body without cream. The whites are the problem: they go into the freezer raw and never reach any temperature that would make them safe.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe three whites are beaten to a froth and frozen straight into the mixture. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only holds it dormant, and the dessert is eaten cold and uncooked. This is the reason the recipe cannot be made as written. If you want a peach ice, work from a current recipe.
- No cooked syrup eitherSome period ices boil the sugar and water into a syrup first, which at least brings part of the base up to temperature. This one does not — sugar, water, fruit and raw whites are simply stirred together cold, so nothing in the bowl is ever heated.
- A coffee-cup is not a measuring cupNineteenth-century household books use the term loosely; a coffee-cup is usually reckoned at somewhere around a cup, and no standard is given here. Two of them against a pint of water makes a very sweet base by modern taste.
- "One can" of peachesCanned fruit of the period came in a range of sizes, often larger than today's standard tin, and the recipe specifies none. The equivalence given here with twelve large fresh peaches is the better guide to quantity.
- The instructions are out of orderThe whites are beaten last in the text but obviously belong folded in before freezing.
- "Freeze the whole into form"In the 1870s this would most likely mean a hand-cranked pail freezer packed with cracked ice and salt, the can turned and the mixture scraped down until it set. "Into form" may also imply packing the finished ice into a mould to firm up, though the recipe does not say so.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by the city's housekeepers, with proceeds going to charitable work — one of the earliest and most widely imitated American charity cookbooks, and the reason so many entries carry a donor's name rather than a title. Mrs. J. Young Scammon belonged to the circle of prominent Chicago families whose names gave such a book its subscription value. The recipe itself is a marker of its decade: canned peaches are offered first and fresh fruit second, an ordering that would likely have been unusual a generation earlier, and the casual instruction to "freeze the whole" assumes a household with both a patent ice-cream freezer and a reliable supply of ice — by the 1870s, one imagines, easier to come by in a lake city than elsewhere. Beaten egg white is often said to have been a cheap way of keeping a water ice from setting into a solid block, doing the work that cream or gelatine does in later recipes.