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Currant Ice
To one pint of currant juice add one pound of sugar, one pint of water; when partly frozen add the whites of two eggs well beaten, and freeze.
A currant water ice of the old school: fruit juice, sugar syrup and a raw meringue stirred in near the end. The proportions are sound, but the finishing step is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe two beaten whites go into a mixture that is already cold and are never cooked at any stage. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it merely suspends it, and a partly frozen sugar syrup is a hospitable medium once the ice softens. Raw shell eggs were used without comment in cookbooks of this era, which is no longer a safe assumption. Use a current recipe built around pasteurised whites if you want this style of ice.
- What the whites were forBeaten whites added at the half-frozen stage lighten the texture and keep a water ice from setting into a solid block of sweet ice, broadly the effect a meringue has when worked into a sorbet. Cooked or pasteurised meringue does the same work.
- The sugar ratioA pound of sugar to a quart of liquid works out to roughly a third by weight, which is about where a water ice needs to be to stay scoopable. Cutting the sugar sharply will give you something closer to a solid ice cube.
- Currant juiceThis means red or white currants, not dried Zante currants, which are grapes. Fresh red currants were a common late-summer garden crop in the period; juice was often taken by crushing and straining rather than cooking, which keeps the colour bright.
- "Freeze" means a crank freezerThe instruction assumes a bucket freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, turned by hand, with the dasher scraping crystals off the wall throughout. "Partly frozen" is the slushy stage, perhaps ten to fifteen minutes into the churning.
- YieldA quart of liquid plus the sugar and the whites gives perhaps a quart and a half of finished ice, enough for several small servings.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar and water frozen with a crank — sat one rung below ice cream in the American household hierarchy: cheaper, lighter, and suitable for serving between courses at a formal dinner as well as at the end of one. Red currants were a natural candidate. They fruit heavily in July in the northern states, keep badly, and are sharp enough to survive a heavy sugar syrup without turning cloying, which is also why they dominate the jelly chapters of the same books. The trick of beating in egg whites partway through the freezing is much older than this volume and is generally traced to European confectioners' practice, where a meringue folded into a churning ice gives it body; American cookbooks pass it along without explanation, as here, assuming the cook already knew what a half-frozen mixture looked like.