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Strawberry Ice Cream
Mrs. Thomas.
Mash with a potato pounder in an earthen bowl, one quart of strawberries with one pound of sugar, rub it through the colander and add one quart of sweet cream and freeze. Very ripe peaches or coddled apples may be used instead of strawberries.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream: no eggs, no cooking, just fruit purée and raw cream frozen together. The whole thing hinges on the sugar, which does the work of both sweetening and keeping the mixture scoopable.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the cultured or slightly turned cream that was common in a kitchen without refrigeration. Use heavy cream, or a mix of roughly three parts heavy cream to one part whole milk if you want it less rich.
- A pound of sugar is not a mistakeThat is about 2¼ cups to a quart of fruit, which reads as extreme but is doing structural work. Sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps an eggless base from setting into a solid brick. Reduce it substantially and the result will freeze harder and icier.
- Mash, then strainThe potato pounder and earthen bowl are a masher and any non-reactive bowl. Rubbing through the colander removes seeds and stem fibre; a medium-mesh sieve does it better than a modern colander, whose holes are too large to catch strawberry seeds.
- Macerate before freezingLet the mashed fruit and sugar sit 30 minutes to an hour before straining. The sugar draws out juice and dissolves, which matters because sugar dissolves only slowly once the mixture is cold.
- "Freeze"In 1877 this meant a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, churned until stiff. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly first, then churn 20–30 minutes and ripen in the freezer for two hours before serving.
- Coddled applesApples gently stewed in a little water or syrup until soft, not boiled hard. Cook them down, purée, and cool completely before combining with the cream.
- YieldRoughly two quarts. Strawberries vary in juiciness; if the fruit is watery, the ice cream will be noticeably icier.
Ice cream made without a cooked custard is generally called Philadelphia-style, and it appealed to American home cooks precisely because it asked so little: no eggs to temper, no stove time, nothing that could curdle. What it did ask for was ice, and that is the interesting part. The Home Cook Book was compiled in 1877, by which point the commercial ice trade had put harvested lake ice into urban iceboxes across the northern United States and Canada, and the hand-crank freezer patented mid-century had made churning a domestic rather than a professional job. A recipe this brief assumes the reader already owns a freezer and can get ice and rock salt without comment. The alternates Mrs. Thomas offers — very ripe peaches, coddled apples — are a reminder that strawberry season was a matter of weeks, and that the same formula was expected to carry a household through the rest of the year.