and that’s ice cream.
I realize that this is a facile statement to make at a time when a) dangerously high temperatures are everywhere (I nearly plotzed when Stephanie said that the temperature in Toronto, with humidex factored in, was 118 degrees); b) we in New York are on the second day of a Dangerous Air Quality advisory; and c) we and our neighbors have no guarantee of electricity when we get home from work tonight. It is also probably not the most responsible of statements to make in a time when we are hard-pressed to open a newspaper without hearing more distressing news about our fitness, or lack thereof, rising obesity rates, rising diabetes rates, rising cancer and heart disease rates, rising sleep deprivation and depression rates, ball of confusion, that’s all the world is today, hey hey. But right now, from the vantage point of a 103-degree day (115 with the humidex), these are all academic questions, and I prefer to ask my academic questions in September, when the weather turns cooler. Only one thing can save us now, and that’s ice cream.
I never did get to make that gorgeous peach ice cream I had planned to make for Blogathon. The peaches, rapidly shriveling on the kitchen table, were all eaten out of hand, and really, they were so good that I just can’t complain about that. There’s nothing to stop me from making vanilla ice cream, though, except that custard-based ice creams need to chill for a minimum of four hours (up to 24 hours) to ensure smooth churning. Assuming I get out of LuthorCorp on time tonight, and the commute home is smooth, I will not have finished custard until at least 6:30 or 7 p.m. tonight. Call me impatient, but I’m not exactly relishing the thought of standing in the kitchen at 11:15 tonight, watching the chill container spin around the Krups machine, wondering if it’s goddamn ice cream yet. It is a night for Philadelphia-style ice cream, and I have a beauty.
Due to its mishandling over the years by indifferent manufacturers, strawberry ice cream has achieved a bit of a wallflower status. Admit it: you heard “strawberry ice cream” and you weren’t particularly excited, were you? Strawberry jam, particularly homemade strawberry jam, makes people happy. Strawberry pie, particularly with rhubarb, can induce ecstasy. Strawberry ice cream, on the other hand, tends to conjure memories like Breyers ice cream, which used to make a decent strawberry, but it was never particularly strawberry-flavored; rather, it was a light vanilla with some berries in it, just enough to turn the whole thing pink. Or it conjures memories like Neapolitan ice cream slices, those staples of school cafeteria lunches in the 1970’s, a strip of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice creams, each flavor tasting identical to the other, all tasting of nothing. Real strawberry ice cream can be much, much better than this. Tonight, it will be.
It is an odd thing to sing the praises of anything strawberry-based now that my farmer’s market is in the full swing of raspberry-and-stone-fruit season, and that most of our strawberries won’t be back until next June. There are a few farmers who raise day-neutral strawberries, though, and those little beauties will be around for a while. I had always been skeptical of day-neutral strawberries, convinced that nature was trying to pull a fast one on us, until I tried one, and realized that I had a whole new habit on which to throw away sums of hard-earned cash that really should have been saved to buy us a home, or at least new underwear. I’m betting that the Wednesday market was not closed on account of heat today, and I’m betting further that there are strawberry purveyors there who look summer-in-the-city heat in the eye and just dare it to blink first; the question is, do I want to make an extra trip downtown, waiting in kiln-like subway stations, to buy their fruit? Or do I want to take the easy way out and go to the health food store for frozen organic strawberries, which aren’t local but are still pretty good? I do not have my final answer, except to say that it’s one or the other, because jettisoning the whole strawberry ice cream idea is not an option.
The standard strawberry ice cream recipe in our house comes from Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking, a book that makes me never want to leave the kitchen, ever, not even on 115-degree days. (As usual, the recipe is Mrs. David’s, but the directions are mine.) It is actually a variation on Mrs. David’s recipe for strawberry water ice, also found in Summer Cooking, with whipped cream added to the finished water ice base. This is ice cream which you will never mistake for anything else. It tastes exactly of what it is made from: strawberries, cream, sugar and just enough lemon and orange juice to keep that sun-saturated, fresh-off-the-vine sweetness from disappearing under the influence of freezing temperatures. Only one thing can save us now, and it’s this.
Strawberry Ice Cream (from Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David, Penguin, 1965)
Yield: 1 quart
½ pound sugar
5 ounces (1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons) water
2 pounds fresh strawberries, cleaned, hulled and sieved or pureed into 20 ounces of pulp
juice of ½ orange
juice of ½ lemon
5 ounces heavy cream
pinch salt (This is my addition; I always add a little salt to ice cream base to help fight the flavor loss that comes from freezing, but again, this is just a pinch. If you can taste the salt, you’ve added too much.)
Combine the sugar and water in a heavy saucepan, put over heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil and let boil for five minutes. Let cool completely before you add it to the strawberry pulp. Mix through, squeeze the lemon and orange juices into the strawberry mixture and mix to combine. Whip the heavy cream until it holds a soft shape, then fold into the strawberry mixture until it is well amalgamated. Add salt. Churn in an ice cream machine, or, if you don’t have a machine, pour into a shallow baking dish, cover with foil, and freeze for 2 ½ hours, stirring it once every half-hour to ensure even freezing. If you have some good vanilla cookies, they would be really good with this ice cream, but if you don’t have good vanilla cookies, and your weather is anything like mine, for heaven’s sake, don’t feel compelled to bake them. 