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Frozen Strawberries
Mash fine ripe berries, make some sweeter than for the table; as soon as the juice is drawn out, freeze, and serve with cream or ice cream.
This is barely a formula at all — crushed sweetened strawberries put into the freezer can and turned. The whole thing depends on getting enough sugar into the fruit and on not letting it set into a solid block.
- Proportions the original omitsFor 2 lb hulled strawberries, figure 3/4 to 1 cup sugar — noticeably more than you would sprinkle on berries at table, as instructed. Sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable rather than icy; cut it back and you get a fruit brick.
- "As soon as the juice is drawn out"Mash the berries with the sugar and leave them 30 to 45 minutes at room temperature until the sugar has dissolved and a pool of syrup has formed. Freezing before the sugar dissolves leaves gritty patches.
- Freeze means churnIn the period of this book "freeze" meant a crank freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, stirring the mixture as it is turned. An ice cream machine does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir hard with a fork every 20 minutes for about two hours, which gives a granita texture.
- A little lemonA tablespoon of lemon juice per 2 lb of fruit sharpens flavor that freezing flattens. Cold dulls both sweetness and acid, so taste the unfrozen purée slightly over-seasoned.
- TextureLeave some of the fruit in pieces rather than reducing everything to a smooth purée — the original says mash, not sieve, and the fragments are the point. Large chunks of raw berry, however, freeze rock hard.
- Yield and serving2 lb of berries makes roughly 1 quart, serving six. Serve within a day or two: with no dairy or egg in the base it hardens steadily in a home freezer, so let it stand 10 minutes before scooping.
Frozen fruit purées of this kind sit alongside the older tradition of water ices in the English kitchen — ices were made simply by sweetening fruit and working it in a metal pot buried in ice and salt. What puts a recipe like this in a "Fancy Dishes" chapter is the increasing availability of ice: by the later nineteenth century commercial ice delivery and the domestic crank freezer meant an ordinary household could freeze something in June, when strawberries were briefly abundant and had to be used at once. The instruction to sweeten more heavily than for the table is the one piece of real technique here — sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps ice crystals small, which is also why the modern version of this dish, sorbet, is built on a measured syrup.