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Strawberry Ice Cream
One quart of cream, one quart of strawberries, one pint of sugar. Mash the strawberries and sugar together and let them stand one or two hours. Add the cream, rub through a strainer into a freezer and freeze, or the cream can be made and when half frozen, the berries stirred in.
An uncooked, eggless ice cream of the type sometimes called Philadelphia-style: cream, fruit, sugar, nothing else. It works in a modern machine with almost no adjustment, and the maceration step is the part that matters.
- Do not skip the macerationThe one or two hours with the sugar draws juice from the berries and dissolves the sugar completely, which is what keeps the finished ice cream from turning icy and grainy. Undissolved sugar and unbroken fruit cells both freeze badly.
- Measure the sugar by volumeA pint of sugar is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz or 400 g. That is a high proportion for a quart of cream, but sugar is also the antifreeze here: cut it much and the mixture freezes hard as a brick.
- "Cream" means heavy creamIn the period this would have been unhomogenized cream, whose fat content varied considerably by dairy. Use heavy or whipping cream, or a mix of heavy cream and whole milk if you want it lighter; lower-fat mixtures freeze coarser.
- A quart of strawberriesThat is a dry quart of whole berries, about 1.5 lb or 700 g, giving roughly 3 cups of mashed fruit.
- The strainerRubbing through a strainer removes seeds and gives a smooth, uniformly pink cream. The alternative given at the end, stirring the crushed berries into half-frozen cream, leaves fruit texture and seeds and produces a rippled result. Both are correct; choose one before you start.
- "A freezer" is the churn, not the applianceThe word means a hand-cranked bucket packed with ice and rock salt. Any modern ice cream maker replaces it directly. Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator first.
- HardeningChurned ice cream comes out at soft-serve consistency. Transfer it to a covered container and freeze several hours before serving, or it will slump on the plate.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, enough for ten to twelve servings.
Ice cream made without eggs or custard is generally called Philadelphia-style, and this is a textbook example: cream, fruit, sugar, and cold. It belongs to the moment when ice cream stopped being a luxury of the wealthy and became a summer commonplace in American households, a shift driven less by any culinary invention than by the commercial ice trade and by the hand-cranked freezer with its inner can and paddle, generally credited to Nancy Johnson in the 1840s. Strawberries were the natural first fruit for it, since the season for good ripe berries and the season for wanting ice cream are the same few weeks.