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Raspberry Ice Cream (Have a vanilla preparation)
Have a vanilla preparation, and when cooked remove from the fire. Press through a sieve into the preparation a half pint preserved raspberries, mix well, strain through a Chinese strainer into freezer, then proceed to finish freezing as per vanilla ice cream and serve the same.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's vanilla custard base in hand. Everything hinges on getting the fruit in while the base is still warm and loose, then chilling the whole thing hard before it goes near the churn.
- The "vanilla preparation"Almost certainly the book's cooked custard base: milk or cream, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla, stirred over gentle heat until it coats the back of a spoon. The book gives no temperature; modern practice is to hold it around 175-180F and never let it boil, or the yolks scramble.
- Half a pint of preserved raspberriesOne cup of raspberry preserves or fruit put up in syrup, not fresh berries. It is already heavily sweetened, so cut the sugar in the custard base by roughly a quarter or the finished cream will be cloying and slow to freeze.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job. The two straining steps here are about seeds, not smoothness: raspberry pips are unpleasant in ice cream.
- Chill before churningThe original sends the mixture straight to the freezer because that meant a bucket churn packed with ice and rock salt, working for half an hour or more. A modern machine needs the base at refrigerator temperature, ideally rested overnight, or it will never set.
- "Freezer" means the churnThroughout books of this period the freezer is the hand-cranked machine, not a cold cabinet. If you are using a still-freeze method in a shallow pan, beat the mixture thoroughly every 30 minutes for the first two hours to break up ice crystals.
- Fruit acid and dairyPreserves stirred into warm custard can cause slight curdling from the acid. Straining afterwards, as directed, covers this, but adding the fruit off the heat rather than over it keeps the texture cleaner.
- YieldThe recipe does not state how much vanilla base to start from. If it makes a quart, a cup of preserves brings it to roughly five cups before churning, or six to eight servings. Ripen it in the freezer for a couple of hours after churning before serving.
Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects that kitchen's habit of building long chains of variations off a single mother preparation: one vanilla custard, then a run of entries telling you what to fold into it. Preserved raspberries rather than fresh point to a recipe meant to be cooked year-round, at a time when a restaurant putting ice cream on the menu in February would have drawn on preserved fruit, syrups or essences much as a domestic kitchen did. The Chinese strainer, or chinois, is generally associated with the French professional kitchen of the period, and its appearance in an American cookbook is a small marker of how completely the fine-dining kitchens of the period had adopted French tools and vocabulary.