TWD - It’s All Peaches and Cream . . . and Honey

I love making homemade ice cream. When I was a kid (OK - until about four years ago), my father’s side of the family had the Fourth of July tradition of making homemade ice cream in a wooden box ice cream maker my great-grandfather made in 1903. It was a wooden box with a metal round insert, crank, and wooden paddles. After my mother made the custard and poured it into the metal container, my father and grandfather would take turns pouring ice and salt around the cylinder and cranking it to mix the custard into ice cream.

They had to take turns because, if you stopped turning, the ice would freeze and the ice cream wouldn’t be finished appropriately. When it got really stiff, my brother and I had to sit on top of the box so they could turn the crank. I remember it taking forever until they couldn’t turn it anymore.

We always did this in the early afternoon on the Fourth. Then my grandmother would put it into the freezer until after dinner. To us, it was like waiting to open presents at Christmas. We each got such a small portion but it was like heaven to eat. Right after eating ice cream, we would walk to the end of the road in my grandparents’ small town in Northern Minnesota to watch the fireworks over the train tracks.

My own ice cream making experience yesterday was very different. First, it was June 15, not July 4. Second, I have an electric ice cream maker so no ice, salt, small children, or sore arms were necessary. Third, my family only ever made vanilla ice cream and my grandfather would have had a fit if we even thought about putting fancy-smancy things in it like peaches or honey or vodka.

Yes, that’s right . . . vodka. I read on the TWD website that the chunks of peaches froze too hard if they were just let be, but if you soaked them in some alcohol, it was better. Well, after surveying all of the possible alcohol choices, I decided vodka was probably the most appropriate alcohol in my cupboard and luckily, I only had about a tablespoon and a half left:

Oh, and I used nectarines instead of peaches. I sort of did this on purpose because I almost always prefer nectarines to peaches because of the skin. And yes, I know we weren’t using the skin and peaches are easier to pit, but I’m a creature of habit and I just grabbed them in the store. That and I had been very discombobulated by hearing a lounge-singer version of "I Want to Be Sedated" on satellite radio just before entering the store. It sounded as if Barry Manilow, John Denver, and Karen Carpenter got together and had a love child. A love child that was slightly . . . off.

Anyway, no one knew the difference (and by "no one" I mean the cooking gods and my boyfriend) and they cooked up in the honey just fine:

The custard was yummy, yummy, yummy. The essentials of any good ice cream:


Some people have commented that the honey was overpowering in this recipe, but I didn’t really think it was. I thought it was well-balanced with the cream and peaches.

After cooling, it went into my electric ice cream maker - a far cry from my grandparents' wooden box and hand cranking. And then the vodka-peach chunks went in:

I didn’t take an end result picture because we wanted to eat it before it was completely set in the freezer, but maybe I will tonight.

Oh, and to finish the story . . . my parents still have the antique ice cream maker, sort of. They still have all the parts, but five years ago, the paddle met with an unfortunate accident. Since it was made a long time ago by hand, the metal pieces were soldered together, probably with lead. To avoid rust, my mother always dried the metal pieces in a warm oven. Unfortunately, she left them in the oven too long that year and melted the solder, thus killing a family tradition. Oh well, she probably saved the younger generation from certain lead poisoning.