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Melon Water Ice
To make a quart of melon-water ice, skin and pound the whole of a ripe melon, and pass it through a sieve. Mix with a pint of juice a syrup made of a quart of water and a pound and a half of sugar and the juice of a lemon. Freeze in the usual manner.
A Victorian sorbet in three lines, written for a cook who already owned a freezing pail. The proportions need reading carefully before you start.
- The syrup is a stock, not an ingredient listThe syrup reads as a stock rather than a strict ingredient list -- A quart of water boiled with 1 1/2 lb sugar makes far more syrup than a quart of finished ice can hold. Make the syrup, then add it to the pint of melon pulp only until the mixture tastes right and reaches a quart, which will take roughly 2 cups. The remainder keeps in the refrigerator for some weeks.
- Sugar level decides the textureWater ices live or die on dissolved sugar: too little and you get a solid block of ice, too much and it never sets. Aim for a mix that tastes slightly sweeter than you want when cold, since freezing dulls perceived sweetness. If you own a refractometer, 28-32 Brix is the working range for sorbet.
- Which melonA Victorian "ripe melon" in an English kitchen usually meant a hothouse muskmelon or cantaloupe rather than watermelon. Cantaloupe or charentais gives the pint of thick pulp the recipe assumes; watermelon yields thin juice and needs less added water in the syrup.
- Pounding and sievingA blender or food processor replaces the mortar, but do not skip the sieve. Melon flesh is fibrous, and the strands freeze into unpleasant threads that a machine will not break down.
- "Freeze in the usual manner"For this period that would ordinarily be a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked until stiff. Any domestic ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- The lemon is structuralOne lemon's juice sharpens melon, which is low in acid and tastes flat when frozen. Add it to taste before churning rather than as a fixed quantity, since melons vary widely in sweetness.
- Yield and servingOne quart, serving six to eight in the small glasses this book's period intended. Water ices firm up hard in a modern freezer, so move the container to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before scooping.
Water ices reached English tables by way of Italy and France, and by the late nineteenth century they were standard equipment in any household with pretensions to a formal dinner. A sorbet was often served between the heavier courses, ostensibly to refresh the palate before the roast, and melon, pineapple and lemon were among the flavours used. The casual instruction to "freeze in the usual manner" is the telling detail: it assumes the reader owns a freezing pail and can buy block ice, which the industrial ice trade of the period had made widely available in British and American cities. Hothouse melons were themselves a mark of a good garden or a good greengrocer, so this modest-looking three-line recipe belonged to a fairly comfortable kitchen.