Plum Ice Cream

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.