Food Processor

This recipe comes from Barbara Tropp, the woman who introduced many Americans to the wonders of Chinese cooking. But she was also one of those people who was just absolutely lovely to be around in every respect. She was deservedly popular in the food community and left many great recipes behind as her legacy, including this famous lemon ice cream. It was passed on to me by Susan Loomis, a dear friend we both had in common. I made it, ate one spoonful, and immediately found another reason to love, and miss, Barbara. It’s superbly lemony and clean…and as zesty as Barbara was herself.

When friends found out I was writing a book on ice cream, many felt compelled to “help out” by passing along really odd flavor combinations they’d either seen or heard of. But somehow, I just couldn’t seem to get enthusiastic about combinations like Clam-Raisin or Duck Fat Swirl. However, when Judy Witts raved about this combination, which she’d enjoyed at her local gelateria in Florence, it piqued my interest. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered that the key to preserving the character of pecorino is to very finely dice the cheese rather than grating it. The little bites of salty cheese are the perfect counterpoint to the fruity, pear-flavored custard.

Surprisingly, a lot of people have never seen a fresh fig. When they do, they invariably ask, “What is that?” Indeed, a majority of the fig harvest gets dried and made into the familiar bar cookies. But fresh figs have a sweet succulence that is unmatched by their dried counterparts. A fig is ripe when the sides crack and split and a dewy drop of juice starts to ooze from the tiny hole in the bottom. Once picked, figs don’t ripen any more, so buy only figs that are dead-ripe. For best results, use Black Mission figs, which will give the ice cream a lovely deep-violet color.

This ice cream combines the best of two worlds: deeply caramelized sugar and sweet, juicy pears. Use the ripest, most flavorful pears you can find, since you want the flavor of the pears to stand up to the slightly burnt taste of the caramel. I recommend Comice or Bartlett pears, which have a heady, roselike aroma when ripe. Don’t be alarmed if the sugar hardens and crackles when you add the pears. Keep cooking, and the pears will dissolve the caramelized sugar nicely.

One winter I visited my friend Kate Hill, who lives in Gascony, a region famous for its tasty prunes, les pruneaux d’Agen. As a means of prying me away from the cozy kitchen hearth, where I could happily eat cassoulet and drink Armagnac all day by the fire, we decided to do something cultural and visit the local prune museum. It was all rather exciting: an entire museum full of educational displays on the history of prunes, including informative dioramas showing the various phases of prune production. We ended our visit with a thrilling film explaining prune cultivation and harvesting, which was a real nail-biter. On our way out, near the prune-filled gift shop (there was a comic book about a prune-fueled superhero…I’m not kidding), was a shrine with a jar holding what they claimed was the world’s oldest prune, dating back to the mid-1800s. For this recipe, you should use prunes that are wrinkled but not necessarily that old, and be alert that it’s become au courant to call them dried plums in America.

If you’re lucky enough to live in an area where fresh apricots are bountiful in the summer, be sure to take advantage of their brief season by churning up a batch of this ice cream. Don’t be put off by apricots that are übersoft, as plump and fragile as an overfilled water balloon, seemingly ready to burst at the slightest touch. Those are invariably the best-tasting fruits.

For many years, I was delighted to work with Lindsey Shere, the founding pastry chef at Chez Panisse. She was constantly surprising us with amazing fruits and berries from neighbors’ backyards and nearby farms. Without fail, Lindsey would come in one weekend each summer carrying a big plastic Tupperware container, which, due to its distinctive rounded shape, left no question that it was precisely designed to hold a canned ham. But instead of a ham, inside would be a jumble of tiny, tender, smushed wild plums picked by her mother. Eaten raw, they were puckery-tart, but once stewed, they made an incredibly flavorful plum ice cream. Each year I would wait patiently for that one late-summer weekend when Lindsey would walk though the door lugging her now-infamous canned ham container. Although wild plums may be hard to come by, you can use whatever plums are available with equal success.

Bill Fujimoto, the produce expert at Monterey Market in Berkeley, grew up in Japan. He once told me about the produce market where his father worked, which featured a wall covered with tarantulas, each individually nailed in place. In days past, native islanders would hoist bunches of bananas onto ships heading landward, and the bananas would sometimes include a little something extra from the jungle lurking beneath the stem. Sometimes people would bring home bananas only to discover an unwelcome houseguest the next day, enjoying a morning stroll across the kitchen counter. In spite of their risky reputation, bananas have become the most popular, and least intimidating, fruit in America. I’ve eaten more than my fair share and have yet to see any hazardous signs of life. (But that doesn’t mean I don’t take a peek every now and then.) Roasting bananas in butter and brown sugar gives them a deep, rich butterscotch flavor, which enhances their abundant natural sweetness.

What do you say when a nice Jewish boy gives up a promising career as a lawyer to become a self-appointed “amateur gourmet”? (“Oy!” his mom probably said.) When the audacious amateur himself, Adam Roberts, used my recipe for Strawberry Frozen Yogurt (page 91) as inspiration for churning up a batch of Sour Cherry Frozen Yogurt, he posted the results on his web site, www.amateurgourmet.com. It was an idea too delicious not to include in this book. However, when pressed for minor details like, say, a recipe or exact quantities, Adam played the amateur card and feigned ignorance, forcing a certain professional to do his duty. This recipe calls for sour cherries, which are different from their sweeter counterparts and sometimes require a bit of foraging to find (Adam found his at Manhattan’s Greenmarket). Their tiny little pits can easily be slipped out by squeezing the cherries with your fingers or with the help of a cherry pitter.

Many apartment buildings in Paris, including mine, have a gardienne. Although their official duties are accepting deliveries and overseeing maintenance, they’re equally famous for being a steady (and remarkably reliable) source of gossip about your neighbors. My gardienne is Madame André, who has young children, so she was always quite happy to accept ice cream while I churned out recipes for this book. Of all the ice creams I gave her, this was her absolute favorite, and she went into Gallic raptures whenever she saw me for days and days afterward. I should probably recommend her for a job as my publicist too, since shortly thereafter I got a reputation in the building as being L’Américain qui fait des glaces, toujours! (the American who makes ice cream, all the time!). If you’re a rice pudding lover, this is the ice cream for you. And be sure to spread the word.

I’ve spent many a summer night enjoying an ice cream cone, flanked by Mexican and Filipino families, at Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco’s Mission District. This ice cream is inspired by ube, the sweet potato ice cream they serve up in addition to all the other exotic flavors they offer. Mitchell’s is so popular that the place is just as packed when the inevitable summer fog rolls in and chills things down as it is when the sun is shining. There’s always a line. But don’t think for a minute that the flavor of this ice cream is too adventurous. Imagine a nice slab of spiced pumpkin pie; this ice cream delivers that classic flavor in one neat scoop of ice cream. The best sweet potatoes to use are a vivid, electric orange. I try to find the brightest orange ones when shopping. Don’t tell, but sometimes I scrape a bit of the skin off one, just to check.

I live above a huilerie in Paris, a shop that sells top-quality oils from all over the world. I decided that Colette, the owner, would be my primary ice cream taste tester. Not only did she have an excellent palate and love to taste things, but I knew that, being French, she’d have absolutely no problem expressing her opinions, good or bad. This was her favorite of all the ice creams I made. Her eyes rolled back in her head when she slipped the first spoonful in her mouth. “Oh lá lá,” she exclaimed.

When I first started to travel to France regularly, the French, when they found out I was American, would rhapsodize “J’adore le Philadelphia!” It took me a while to realize they were enthralled with our cream cheese, which is indeed worthy of international acclaim. They’ve adopted cheesecake too, calling it le gâteau fromage or simply le cheesecake.

Maybe I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. When I visited the Chartreuse distillery in the French Alps, our guide told us that the exact recipe for the famed herbal liqueur was a closely guarded secret, known only by three brothers who worked at the monastery. Astounded, I spoke up. “Wow, that’s incredible. What is the likelihood of three brothers going into the same business together, as well as becoming monks at the same monastery?” The other guests on the tour simply stopped and looked at me with their mouths slightly agape. Then our guide enlightened me and we moved on, but not before I overheard a few hushed conversations evaluating my intellect. This is a very light ice cream, and it’s so simple that anyone, regardless of their intelligence level, can easily put it together.

On my first visit to Torino, I arrived in rabid pursuit of gianduja, a confection made from local hazelnuts ground with milk chocolate that is a specialty of the Piedmont region. I’d also never had gianduja gelato at the source. I did not leave disappointed. I watched with anticipation as the gelato maker at Caffè San Carlo smeared dense gelato from his gleaming freezer into a cone. It was hazelnut heaven. Use top-quality milk chocolate with at least 30 percent cocoa solids.

If you’re one of those people who finds the combination of raspberries with dark chocolate the ultimate luxury, you’ll adore this ice cream. It’s the perfect indulgence: rich, dark chocolate with the bright flavor of tangy raspberries.

This tart-sweet relish is thick enough for you to plop some into the crevices of a samosa for a wonderful, classic Indian food taste treat. Tamarind is known as the “date of India,” and the delectable marriage of the two kinds of dates in this chutney is a natural. Both ingredients lend body, their flavors perfectly complementing each other. I’ve eaten this chutney off a spoon. If available, use jaggery (unrefined Indian sugar) or Southeast Asian palm sugar instead of the brown sugar. Sticky dark brown slabs of tamarind pulp are sold at Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian markets in a double layer of plastic packaging. Soft dates, such as Medjools, work best. Otherwise, soak chewy, hard dates in just-boiled water for about an hour to soften them, then drain and proceed.

While this relish boldly says, “I am mint!,” it also has a bite from chile, ginger, and raw onion. Lime juice and sugar tame and unite the ingredients. This, along with the Tamarind and Date Chutney (page 220), provides just the right bright accents to Indian Samosas (page 115).

A simple, everyday relish from India, this condiment adds a wallop of fresh spiciness to food. Each cook has a different take on green chutney, and many add chopped onion and grated coconut. The straightforward approach here keeps the flavors bright. Green chutney is purposely hot, but feel free to seed the chiles or use a less-alarming chile, such as jalapeño, for less dramatic results.

When you present dumplings with this sauce, the combination may recall an Italian pasta dish, but the sauce’s zesty qualities resemble the Latin flavors of Mexico more than of Europe. But on closer analysis, the combination of chile, ginger, herbs, and spices is definitely Asian, specifically Nepal’s Himalayan cuisine, which blends Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan traditions. In the Nepalese repertoire, this sauce is a type of achar (a moniker for chutneys and pickles) and is what typically accompanies momo; it’s great with Tibetan momo, too. With a tangy edge, moderate heat, and spiced depth, the sauce has a multilayered punch that begins seemingly subtle but finishes with a certain feistiness. Sometimes ground toasted sesame seeds are added for richness, but I find that they mute the other flavors too much.