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Currant Cream Ice
Take one pint of red currant-juice (see CURRANT CREAM, RED), mix with it a pint of cream, sweeten and freeze. A few raspberries or strawberries are an improvement. The icecream may be made with red currant jelly instead of juice if the fresh fruit is not in season. Currant-water ice is much more wholesome and refreshing than cream ice. It is made by mixing a pint of juice with syrup produced by boiling a pound and a half of sugar with a quart of water, and then freezing the mixture like cream. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. per quart. (See also CURRANTWATER ICE).
A two-ingredient ice that depends entirely on the quality of the fruit and on how hard you sweeten it. The book gives no sugar quantity for the cream version, which is the one thing you have to settle before you start.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint of juice and a pint of cream give about 1.14 litres of mix, that is one imperial quart before any air is churned in. Expect eight small servings.
- Sweeten to about 20 per centSweeten generously -- Redcurrant juice is fiercely acidic and sugar is what keeps the ice scoopable as well as palatable. Around 6-7 oz (170-200 g) sugar per pint of juice is the working range; taste the unfrozen mix, which should seem slightly too sweet, since cold mutes sweetness sharply.
- Which creamVictorian "cream" was pan-skimmed and variable, often nearer modern single or whipping cream than double. Heavy cream alone freezes greasy and dense here; half heavy cream and half whole milk gives a better texture against the sharp fruit.
- Jelly instead of juiceRedcurrant jelly is already about 60 per cent sugar. Melt it gently, thin with water to the volume of a pint, and cut the added sugar to little or nothing, then taste.
- "Freeze" means churnThe half hour is time in a pail freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, cranked or stirred. In a domestic machine reckon 25-35 minutes with a thoroughly pre-chilled mix; without a machine, freeze in a shallow tray and beat hard every 30 minutes.
- No eggs, no stabiliserThis is a raw uncooked mix with nothing to hold water in suspension, so it sets rock hard and grainy within a day. Serve it straight from the churn, or temper it 15 minutes in the refrigerator before scooping.
- The water-ice syrupA pound and a half of sugar boiled with a quart of water, then let down with a pint of juice, lands the finished sorbet near 28 per cent sugar, at the upper end of the usual modern range. Reducing the sugar to about a pound gives a firmer ice.
- Cost2s 6d a quart was not a trivial sum in a Victorian household; the entry does not itemise it, though cream and ice would have been the expensive parts rather than garden currants.
Redcurrants were a standard fixture of the English kitchen garden long before they were a dessert ingredient, valued chiefly for jelly to eat with mutton and for the clear, acid juice that set so readily. Cassell's cross-references the entry to CURRANT CREAM, RED and to CURRANT-WATER ICE, which is how the dictionary format works: the juice is pressed once and then spent across several preparations. The confident aside that the water ice is "more wholesome and refreshing than cream ice" reflects a widely held Victorian view that iced cream sat heavily on the stomach while fruit ices aided digestion, a piece of dietary common sense rather than anything demonstrated. That such ices appear at all in a general household dictionary of the period says something about the ice trade, which by the later nineteenth century was shipping lake ice into British ports in bulk and putting frozen desserts within reach of middle-class kitchens that had no ice house of their own.