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Currant Ice
Boil down three pints of water and a pound and a half sugar to one quart, skim, add two cups of currant juice. and when partly frozen, add the whites of five eggs.
A currant water ice thickened at the end with unbeaten raw whites, in the style of a sherbet rather than a cream. The syrup is cooked; the eggs are not, and that is the problem.
- The raw whites are the hingeFive egg whites go into a mixture that is already partly frozen and never sees heat again. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only halts its growth, and the finished ice is held cold for days while being served in small portions. Anyone wanting a currant sherbet with egg white in it should follow a current recipe written for pasteurised whites.
- Why the whites are there at allIn a hand-cranked freezer, albumen added at the mushy stage traps air and interferes with ice-crystal growth, giving a lighter, less gritty texture. Nineteenth-century cooks used it as a stabiliser, in the same role modern sherbets give to gelatin, corn syrup or commercial stabiliser blends.
- Reading the syrupThree pints of water with a pound and a half of sugar boiled down to one quart is not an arbitrary instruction: it fixes the sugar concentration, and with it how hard the ice freezes. Too little sugar and the result is a solid block; too much and it never sets. The boil-down is the measurement.
- SkimmingThe scum drawn off a boiling syrup carries away froth and whatever impurities the sugar contains; how much a nineteenth-century sugar threw depended on how refined it was. Modern granulated sugar throws very little, so the instruction matters less now.
- Currant juiceThis means fresh currants, not the dried Zante currants sold in the baking aisle, which are grapes. Fresh currants are seasonal and scarce in most markets; frozen fruit and unsweetened currant juice are the usual substitutes.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of liquid before any egg is added: one quart of reduced syrup plus two cups of currant juice.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) devotes a full section to ices and ice-creams at exactly the moment when the crank freezer had moved from a luxury to something a well-run Midwestern household might own. A water ice like this one cost far less than a custard cream: sugar, water, and fruit from the garden, currants being one of the reliable small fruits of a northern kitchen plot before white pine blister rust regulations drove Ribes plantings out of much of the United States in the twentieth century. The trick of beating in egg white partway through the freezing is old and widespread in the period's manuals; a sherbet lightened in this way, with hot syrup poured onto beaten whites, was known as a spoom.