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Frozen Fruits with Cream
1 quart mashed, fresh peaches, strawberries, raspberries or canned peaches or apricots 1 cup heavy cream Karo, Red Label, to sweeten after adding cream Combine, place in the ice cream freezer, pack in three parts of cracked ice to one of rock salt and freeze as usual. cracked ice to one of rock salt and freeze as usual.
A hand-crank ice cream freezer recipe from a corn syrup promotional booklet. It works in a modern machine with almost no changes, but the syrup and the sweetening order both deserve a word.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold under colour-coded labels, the red one generally being the darker, refiner's-syrup blend rather than the pale Blue Label. For fruit and cream, light corn syrup gives a cleaner flavour; plain sugar syrup works too, though the texture will be slightly firmer.
- Why syrup rather than sugarCorn syrup depresses the freezing point and interferes with ice crystal growth, so the finished ice stays scoopable instead of setting to a solid block. That is presumably the booklet's selling point. The recipe gives no quantity; sweeten to taste, but bear in mind that a heavy hand with syrup will leave the mixture slow to firm up.
- Sweeten last, and taste coldThe instruction to sweeten after adding the cream may well be practical: the dairy blunts the fruit's acidity, so the sugar you would have judged right for the naked puree can be too much once cream is in. Cold also mutes sweetness, so the unfrozen mixture should taste faintly too sweet.
- Canned fruitDrain canned peaches or apricots well and account for the packing syrup already in them before adding Karo. Fruit canned in heavy syrup may need almost no extra sweetening at all.
- Ice and saltThree parts cracked ice to one of rock salt by volume is a standard brine mix for a bucket freezer, cold enough to freeze the mixture well below 32F. In a modern compressor or frozen-bowl machine, ignore this entirely and churn 20 to 30 minutes.
- CreamHeavy cream here means roughly 36 percent butterfat, added liquid and unwhipped. Anything lighter will freeze icy, since there is no egg and no cooked custard base to carry it.
- RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft. Transfer to a chilled container and hold two to three hours in the freezer to firm and let the fruit flavour settle, then let it stand a few minutes before serving.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half after churning, serving six to eight as a luncheon course.
Books with titles in this vein were rarely disinterested: through the first decades of the twentieth century, corn syrup refiners, gelatine makers and shortening companies published slim recipe pamphlets whose real work was to put a branded product into every formula on the page. The repeated, specific call for Karo Red Label rather than simply "syrup" is the tell. The chemistry being sold, though, was genuine — corn syrup is largely glucose and shorter chains that resist crystallising, and confectioners and ice cream makers had long valued it for keeping frozen desserts smooth and sherbets from turning grainy. Sugar shortages and conservation campaigns around the First World War gave such syrups a further push into home kitchens. Frozen fruit with cream, needing no custard and no cooking, was exactly the kind of dish a hostess could send in at luncheon in the days when a bucket freezer, ice and rock salt were ordinary equipment.