It was summer when we received a letter from a reader requesting a recipe for fruit ice cream that was as lush and rich as Ruth Reichl's chocolate ice cream . The secret is to cook the fruit down to a jamlike consistency with sugar, which lowers the freezing point. We were working on our fall issues at the time, so we developed a seasonally appropriate cranberry ice cream ; we also couldn't resist taking advantage of the local peaches sitting on our countertop. Frozen peaches are a perfectly good stand-in for fresh in this case, and a scoop of peach ice cream on a slice of toasted pound cake can be a beautiful thing in the dead of winter. For the silkiest peach ice cream ever, work with the all-cream base for the cranberry ice cream .