Mille Fruit Cream Ice

I’ve always enjoyed citrus-based frozen desserts and ices, including the much overlooked Orange Sherbet. These are refreshing, and when sweet-tart they make you want to eat more.

This recipe comes from “The Complete Confectioner, Pastry-Cook, and Baker: Plain and Practical Directions for Making Confectionary and Pastry, and for Baking; With Upwards of Five Hundred Receipts . . .With Additions and Alterations by Parkinson, Practical Confectioner, Chestnut Street“.

The Parkinson in this case is Eleanor Parkinson, of Philadelphia, of Philadelphia ice cream and confectionery fame. This book is now in the public domain and while they can be purchased from a few people reprinting this classic, it can also be downloaded and further studied for free from the Feeding America project from MSU Library’s collection which has cookbooks ranging in publishing dates from 1798 to 1922. Any cookbook published before 1923 is in the public domain.

This book has a great introduction for Ices (the section the recipe comes from):

There is no article of the dessert kind that deserves a more elevated position than well-made ices, as well for there intrinsic merit as for the agreeable goût which they impart to a well-got-up entertainment.

Philadelphia has for a long time enjoyed a pre-eminent reputation in the manufacture of these delicious compounds; the rage however for cheap articles, without due regard to their merits, has made sad inroads into the business; and, in order to accomodate this spirit of retrenchment, ignorant pretenders have consented to the base practice of making inferior articles, which they palm off on the unwary under the guise of economy. With these persons it is a custom to use three-fourths milk and only one-fourth of the legitimate article, cream, and, in order to procure a suffiecent body, to intermix boiled flour, arrowroot, or potatoe flour; also to flavour with tartaric acid instead of fresh lemons, tonquin bean instead of vanilla, and inferior fruits when the best only should be used.

We mention these facts in order to caution young beginners against any such fatal mistakes. The best ingredients should always be used.

If the writer(s) of this book were here today and happened to look at the ingredient lists of many commercially made ice creams and ices that are mass produced today, they would have a modern-day fit.

Mille Fruit Ice Cream

This recipe calls for ingredients that I don’t have on hand, but these are what I would substitute for: Modin’s Elderflower syrup for wild elderflowers, dried blackberries for the preserved dried fruits, and pureed blackberries for ‘prepared cochineal.’ Yes, real cochineal, bugs, prepared as to color food stuffs with.

Original recipe: