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Strawberry Ice Cream
Press through a sieve into a bowl half pint preserved strawberries. Have a vanilla ice-cream preparation and when removing it from the fire add the strawberry puree (strained); mix well with a wooden spoon; then strain through a sieve into the freezer and proceed to freeze the same as for vanilla.
A fruit variation that assumes you already have a cooked vanilla custard base and a hand-crank freezer on hand. Two details carry the whole thing: the puree goes in off the heat, and the base must be cold before it is churned.
- Half pint of preservesThat is one cup of preserved strawberries, fruit and syrup together. Preserves of the period were often made at roughly equal weights fruit and sugar, so the puree brings its own sweetness with it; the recipe itself says nothing about adjusting the sugar in the vanilla base.
- "When removing it from the fire"Add the puree to the custard once it is off the heat, not while it is still cooking. A boiled custard is at the edge of curdling already, and the acid in strawberry pulp will push it over.
- The vanilla preparationThe book means its own vanilla ice-cream preparation, a cooked custard of milk or cream, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla, stirred over gentle heat until it coats the spoon. The book gives no temperature; on a modern thermometer that stage falls somewhere around 170-180F, and much hotter than that will scramble the yolks.
- Chill before freezingThe recipe sends the mixture straight into the freezer. Cool the base over a bowl of ice and then refrigerate it for several hours; a warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture.
- Straining twiceThe puree is sieved once and the finished mixture again. This is not fussiness -- preserved strawberries carry seeds and fibrous cores that read as grit in frozen cream. A fine mesh sieve does both passes.
- "The freezer"A wooden bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt around a metal canister, cranked by hand. Any modern ice cream maker stands in for it. Churn until thick, then firm the cream in the freezer for a few hours before serving.
- ColourCooked preserves give a dull brick pink, not the bright red of modern strawberry ice cream. That is what the recipe produces and it is correct; adding fresh berries for colour will water down the base.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much vanilla preparation to make, so the yield depends entirely on the batch of base you start from; a cup of puree is the only fixed quantity.
Strawberry is often said to have been one of the standard flavours of the nineteenth-century ice cream trade, and this version tells you why cooks reached for preserves rather than fruit: before reliable year-round berries, a jar of last summer's strawberries was one of the readiest ways to make the flavour in January. The instruction to build it on "a vanilla ice-cream preparation" is characteristic of professional cookbooks of the era, which set out one mother recipe and then treated every other flavour as a variation folded into it -- an economy of writing that mirrors the economy of a restaurant kitchen turning out several ices from a single batch of custard. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its ice cream chapter reflects that professional lineage: egg-yolk custard bases, hand-cranked freezers packed with ice and rock salt, and the assumption that a cook works through a sieve as a matter of course.