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Strawberry Ice
Mash two quarts of strawberries with two pounds of sugar; let stand an hour or more, squeeze in a straining cloth, pressing out all the juice; add an equal measure of water; and when half frozen, add the beaten whites of eggs in the proportion of three eggs to a quart.
A strawberry water ice of the standard nineteenth-century type, finished with raw beaten egg white folded in partway through freezing. That last step is the problem: the whites are never heated at any point, and the mixture is then held cold, which does nothing to make them safe.
- Why the cautionThree raw egg whites per quart are stirred into a half-frozen ice and eaten as they are. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it. Any current sorbet or ice recipe should be used instead.
- The whites are not incidentalThey are doing real work here, aerating the ice and keeping it from setting into a solid block, so they cannot simply be dropped without changing the result. That is another reason to work from a modern recipe rather than adapt this one.
- Standing time is for colour and flavourThe hour of macerating with sugar draws juice and pigment out of the fruit by osmosis. Two quarts of berries is roughly 3 lb, and two pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups, though sweetness reads lower once the mixture is frozen.
- "An equal measure of water"Equal to the strained juice, not to the original fruit. Straining through a cloth discards the pulp, which is why the historical result is a granular water ice rather than the purée-based sorbet a modern cook expects.
- Freezing equipment"Half frozen" assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt, scraped and churned as it sets. That stage is less easy to identify in a sealed modern machine.
- YieldPerhaps around three quarts finished, depending on how much juice the berries give up — more than many domestic ice-cream makers will hold in one batch.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by local housewives, devotes a full section to ices and ice-cream at a moment when both were moving from luxury to something a well-organised household could manage. The hand-cranked freezer with its inner can and salted ice jacket had been in domestic use since the middle of the century, and commercial ice harvesting made summer freezing plausible inland. An "ice" in this vocabulary is water-based and fruit-flavoured, distinct from the custard-based cream that follows it in the same chapter; the line descends from the Italian and French sorbetti and glaces d'eau that reached English and American cookery through eighteenth-century confectioners. Beaten egg white seems to have been a common household trick for lightening such an ice before stabilisers existed, and it turns up in the same position — added when the mixture is half frozen — in cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the period.