Home › The Principles of Cookery › Currant-Water Ice
Currant-Water Ice
Get one pint of the juice of red currants, to which have been added a few raspberries to give additional colour. Add a pound and a half of sugar boiled to a syrup with one quart of water, and mix the juice thoroughly with the syrup. Strain the liquid into the mould and freeze. Time, half an hour to draw out the juice. Sufficient for three pints of ice. (See also CURRANT CREAM ICE.)
A straightforward fruit sorbet in Victorian dress: a heavy sugar syrup, fresh red currant juice, and a spell in the freezing pot. The proportions are sound, but the equipment language needs translating.
- "Mould" means the freezing pot"Mould" here most likely means the freezing pot -- the metal vessel packed round with ice and coarse salt in which the mixture was frozen and stirred, though the same word was also used of shaped moulds the finished ice was turned out of. Any modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes.
- Quantities in modern termsIf the pint is imperial (20 fl oz), one pint of juice is about 2 1/2 US cups, and the quart of water about 5 US cups; on US measure they would be 2 cups and 4 cups. A pound and a half of sugar is roughly 3 1/3 cups.
- What the half hour is forThe stated time is not freezing time but the period needed to draw juice from the crushed fruit — currants sit in a bowl or over gentle heat until they give up their liquid. Expect to work through 2 to 2 1/2 lb of currants to get a pint of juice.
- Cool the syrup firstBoil the sugar and water to a clear syrup, then let it cool completely before mixing in the raw juice. Adding hot syrup to fresh currant juice dulls the colour and the sharp fresh flavour that is the whole point of the dish.
- Strain properlyCurrants are all skin and seed. Push the pulp through a fine sieve or a jelly bag; anything coarser leaves grit that turns unpleasant once frozen.
- Sugar is structuralThe syrup looks extravagant but sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than solid. Reducing it much below the given proportion gives a block of red ice. Taste the mixture before freezing — it should be noticeably sweeter than you want the finished ice to be, since cold mutes sweetness.
- Yield and servingThree pints, so eight to ten small servings. Serve within a day or two, in chilled glasses; a domestic freezer will often hold a water ice harder than it was served from the pail, so let it stand 10 minutes before scooping.
Water ices reached English tables well before cream ices became commonplace, and by the late nineteenth century a well-run household kitchen was expected to produce them from whatever fruit the garden gave up. Red currants were exactly that kind of fruit: heavy-cropping, intensely acid, grown along walls and in kitchen gardens across Britain, and ripening in a short midsummer glut that had to be used at once as jelly, cordial or ice. The handful of raspberries added "to give additional colour" is a common trick of the period; raspberry deepens the juice to the scarlet a Victorian confectioner wanted on the table. Cassell's gives the recipe as an alphabetical entry, cross-referenced to a currant cream ice, reflecting the standard division of the ice-maker's art into water ices bound only by syrup and richer ices bound by cream or custard.