Lest anyone think that Fridays in my house are all dolor and sacrifice and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, let me say a few words now about homemade ice cream. Among other things. 
First let me say that until about two weeks ago, I’d never made ice cream. When my husband and I married, nearly twenty years ago now, we managed to acquire all kinds of useful and decorative items, but we did not get an ice cream maker.
Since that day, our fortunes have been such that an ice cream maker, while always an object of desire, never made it very far up the budget ladder. The transmission would fall out of the car, or we would move or have a baby or both at the same time, and thoughts of homemade ice cream would retire to that back room of our minds reserved for trips to Hawaii and a lifetime supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat.
Recently, however, we were in Memphis, clearing a sofa and some tables and lamps and a rug and other miscellaneous possessions of ours out of my mother’s garage. To portage the lot back to North Carolina we hired a ten-foot U-Haul trailer, and even after we’d filled it with furniture, there was plenty of room left over.
“Well,” I said to my mother. “Got anything you want to get rid of right now?”
She couldn’t think of a thing, not one thing, other than a crockpot, a box of wooden building blocks, some flower pots, a few winter-hardy ferns out of the yard, and her ice-cream maker for which, as she said, she no longer had any pressing need.
This ice cream maker is a 70s-vintage Dolly Madison Pacer, from the J.E. Porter Company (A Division of Stenning Industries, Inc.: A Century of Quality Manufacturing). It’s not a hand-crank model, but the type with a motorized dasher. Well might Stenning Industries, Inc., lay claim to A Century of Quality Manufacturing, because amazingly, contra the experience of friends who’ve owned and discarded a series of automatic ice-cream makers, the motor on this one hasn’t burned out.
So. Now we can make ice cream. On our return from Memphis, the Visiting Graduate Student’s sister passed through town on her way home from the l’Abri Fellowship near Boston, and as she was still in l’Abri-worker mode, she made dinner for us. My contribution was this homemade apricot-mango ice cream, an adaptation of a peach ice-cream recipe:
3 pints heavy cream
2 cups sugar
about 8 apricots, blanched, skinned, and mashed
some diced fresh mango (Not sure how much I actually used. My mangoes were not very ripe and resisted peeling and dicing. Also, as I discovered —probably the rest of the world knew this already — mangoes don’t respond that well to blanching).
You warm the cream and sugar together until the sugar dissolves into the cream. Don’t boil! Chill the cream-sugar solution, then add the also-chilled fruit puree and the mango chunks. If I’d had a food processor, I would have pureed the mango, too, but mine was way too firm to respond to mashing with a potato masher, much to the chagrin of the 7-year-old, who was doing the mashing.
Chill this whole concotion in a mixing bowl (if it’s not chilled enough already), then transfer to your ice-cream freezer and follow manufacturer’s directions.
I actually doubled the original peach ice-cream recipe, and the resulting mixture filled my freezer’s cannister just over halfway, leaving plenty of room for expansion during the dashing-and-freezing process.
It was wonderful, just the right balance of tart and sweet and rich. The mango was much better in frozen chunks than it had been raw or blanched. And nobody says you can’t eat ice cream on Fridays.
More ice-cream recipes:
Honey-Lavender Ice Cream
Stem Ginger, Fresh Mint, and Other Unusual Ice Cream Combinations
Lime Sorbet
Also, whatever happened to Dolly Madison ice cream?
. . .
Some years back our VGS also spent a year at the Massachusetts l’Abri; I found him in their photo gallery, standing around in the kitchen there much as he’s stood around in our kitchen here all summer long, engaged in idle jesting before proceeding to wash the dishes.
For him the time at l’Abri was both a catalyst and the narrowing of a search process which led him at length to reception into the Catholic Church and serious consideration of a vocation to the monastic life. That’s really what his summer with us has been about. His ostensible purpose in coming was to do some intensive Latin study, to fulfill the language requirement for his M.A. in English. This he has done with enviable discipline, in the midst of our daily household chaos.
More than that, though, and more even than the prospect of being near our neighboring Benedictines, he wanted to develop a fuller habit of daily prayer, and that’s difficult to do alone. A culture of one isn’t much of a culture. A solitary table blessing, for instance, is not the same thing as a blessing prayed in chorus with other voices. His being with us has spurred us to greater intentionality in our own common prayer, and to a greater awareness of our home as a monastic place, with rhythms of turning together, like a stand of sunflowers, towards the Great Sun as the created one moves across the sky. Whatever we might have done for him, in giving him a place under our roof from three months, has been returned to us a hundredfold and more.
It was with this kind of thing in mind that we fell in love with the house we now live in, and went out on a limb to buy it: more than simply room for our family, we wanted room for hospitality, with the intent to nurture Christian culture a little, with people other than ourselves sometimes, as we’re given the grace to do it: Morning Prayer, the Angelus, the Rosary; feast days; Mass-, Confession-, and Adoration-going; a shared Friday sacrifice to remind us of Christ’s work on the Cross.
Not to mention that whole Cross-motif thing.
In light of all this, you might like to read T.S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture, which has had something to do with why we are the way we are.
Also this essay by Robert Louis Wilken, which I read in our first year of homeschooling, and which shed light on why, exactly, we were doing what we were doing, and where we might be going with it.
Anyway, because even on Friday there’s rejoicing in heaven, I think we’ll have some ice cream.
You have a decision to make: double or nothing.
For this week only, a generous supporter has offered to fully match all new and increased donations to First Things up to $60,000.
In other words, your gift of $50 unlocks $100 for First Things, your gift of $100 unlocks $200, and so on, up to a total of $120,000. But if you don’t give, nothing.
So what will it be, dear reader: double, or nothing?
Make your year-end gift go twice as far for First Things by giving now.
