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Water Ice
To a quart of water, add one pound of sugar, flavor to taste, and freeze.
Jellies were formerly reputed nourishing, digestible, and fit food for sick and delicate persons, but modern investigation places them second to the lean part of animals and birds. When made of gelatine, they have no nutrition, and are simply used to carry a palatable flavor. Always make jellies in a porcelain kettle, if possible, but brass may be used if scoured very bright and the fruit is removed immediately on taking from the fire. Use the best refined or granulated sugar, and do not have the fruit, especially currants and grapes, overripe.
To extract the juice, place fruit in kettle with just enough water to keep from burning, stir often, and let remain on the fire until thoroughly scalded; or a better but rather slower method is to place it in a stone jar set within a kettle of tepid water, boil until the fruit is well softened, stirring frequently, and then strain a small quantity at a time through a strong coarse flannel or cotton bag wrung out of hot water, after which let it drain, and squeeze it with the hands as it cools, emptying the bag and rinsing it off each time it is used. The larger fruits, such as apples and quinces, should be cut in pieces, cores removed if at all defective, water added to just cover them, boiled gently until tender, turned into bag and placed to drain for three or four hours, or over night. Make not over two or three pints of jelly at a time, as larger quantities require longer boiling. As a general rule allow equal measures juice and sugar. Boil juice rapidly ten minutes from the first moment of boiling, skim, add sugar, and boil ten minutes longer; or spread the sugar (181) in a large dripping-pan, set in the oven, stir often to prevent burning, boil the juice just twenty minutes, add the hot sugar, let boil up once, and pour into the jelly-glasses immediately, as a thin skin forms over the surface which keeps out the air; cover with brandied tissue paper, cut to fit glass closely, cool quickly and set in a dry, cool, dark place. Jelly should be examined toward the end of summer, and if there are any signs of fermentation, reboil. Jelly needs more attention in damp, rainy seasons than in others. To test jelly, drop a little in a glass of very cold water, and if it immediately falls to the bottom it is done; or drop in a saucer, and set on ice or in a cool place; if it does not spread, but remains rounded, it is finished. Some strain through the bag into the glasses, but this involves waste, and if skimming is carefully done is not necessary. A little butter or lard, rubbed with a cloth on the outside of glasses or cans, will enable one to pour in the boiling fruit or liquid, the first spoon or two slowly, without breaking the glass. If jelly is not very firm, let it stand in the sun covered with bits of windowglass or pieces of mosquito netting, for a few days. Never attempt to make jelly in damp or cloudy weather if firmness and clearness are desired. Use a wooden or silver spoon to stir, dip with earthen cup, and cook in porcelain-lined kettles. Currants and berries should be made up as soon as picked; never let them stand over night. When ready to put away, cover with pieces of tissue or writing-paper cut to fit and pressed closely upon the jelly, and put on the lid or cover with thick paper, brushed over on the inside with the white of an egg, and turned down on the outside of glass.
The recipe proper is two lines: a sugar syrup, a flavoring, and a freezer. Everything after "and freeze" is the book's general essay on jelly-making, printed here because the section runs on; it belongs to preserves, not to ices.
- The syrup ratioA pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, dissolved in 4 cups water. That is roughly a third sugar by weight, a proportion that keeps a water ice scrapeable rather than solid. Cut the sugar much below this and it freezes into a block.
- Flavor to taste, with an eye on volumeWhatever you add — lemon or orange juice, crushed raspberries and their juice, strong coffee — displaces water and dilutes the syrup. A cup of juice or fruit pulp to the quart, added after the syrup has cooled, is a reasonable starting point.
- Dissolve, then chillHeat the water and sugar only until the sugar has gone clear, then cool the syrup completely before freezing. Adding warm syrup to a churn wastes ice and gives coarse crystals.
- Freezing without a churnThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, churn until it holds a soft mound. Still-frozen in a shallow pan, scrape the mass with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- AlcoholIf you flavor with wine, brandy or a liqueur, keep it to a few tablespoons per quart. Alcohol depresses the freezing point sharply and a heavier hand will leave you with cold slush that never sets.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half finished, enough for six modest servings. Water ices are best within a day or two; they turn icy in the freezer faster than a custard ice cream does.
- On the jelly passage: brass and porcelain"Porcelain kettle" means an enameled cast-iron or enameled steel pan. Use that or stainless. The warning about brass is real — acid fruit attacks copper alloys — and there is no reason to use a brass pan today.
- On the jelly passage: heating the sugarWarming sugar in a dripping-pan in the oven, as the text directs, was done so it would dissolve instantly and shorten the boil. It is a sound trick, though modern recipes achieve the same by boiling the juice hard before the sugar goes in.
- On the jelly passage: do not seal this wayTissue paper, brandied paper, egg-white-brushed covers and standing the glasses in the sun are pre-canning methods that rely on a surface mold layer being harmless. They are not adequate seals, and the advice to reboil jelly showing signs of fermentation should be ignored. Follow current tested guidance for processing and sealing jars.
Water ices reached American cookbooks by way of France and Italy, where sorbetto and glace à l'eau had been fashionable since the seventeenth century; the plain sugar-and-water base flavored with fruit juice is the oldest and simplest form of frozen dessert, older than the custard ice creams that eventually eclipsed it. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and reprinted for decades, gives it in a single sentence; by then the hand-crank freezer, commercial ice harvesting and cheap refined sugar had turned what was a luxury of the ice-house era into a summer standby. The jelly essay that follows the recipe is a useful accident: it shows how much practical technique these books packed into their preserving chapters, and how much of home preserving depended on judgment, weather and the eye rather than on a thermometer.