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Mille Fruit Ice-Cream
Rasp two lemons, take the juice of them, a glass of wine, one of grape-syrup, a pint of thick cream, and eight ounces of powdered sugar. Mix and freeze, and when sufficiently congealed, add four ounces of preserved fruits, which cut small, and mix well with the ice. Let the cream remain in the ice until wanted. Probable cost, 3s., exclusive of wine, etc. Sufficient for a quart mould.
A Victorian custard-free ice — nothing but cream, sugar, lemon and wine, churned and studded with candied fruit. A few of its terms and proportions need translating.
- "Rasp two lemons"Rasping meant rubbing the whole lemon against a grater, or against a sugar lump until the lump was saturated with oil. Either way it is the zest you want; work it into the sugar so the oil is carried through the mixture rather than sitting in strands.
- Curdling is the hingeTwo lemons' juice plus wine going into raw cream can thicken or curdle it if added carelessly. Dissolve the sugar in the juice, wine and syrup first, then whisk that acid mixture slowly into the cold cream, not the reverse. Churn straight away.
- "A glass of wine"A wineglass in Victorian measure is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (¼ cup), though the measure was not standardised. The recipe does not say which wine; a sweet one — sherry, madeira or a dessert white — suits it. "One of grape-syrup" means the same glass measure.
- Grape-syrupA reduced, unfermented grape must, sold as sirop de raisiné and still available as grape molasses or Turkish pekmez. Boiled-down grape juice or a good grape jelly thinned with water stands in.
- Preserved fruitsCandied or glacé fruit — cherries, angelica, citron peel, apricot. Chop to pea size and chill the pieces before folding them in, so they do not soften the set ice.
- Sugar and freezing pointEight ounces of sugar to a pint of cream is high by modern standards, and the alcohol depresses the freezing point further. Expect a soft, scoopable ice rather than a firm one, and do not be tempted to increase the wine.
- FreezingThe original would have been frozen in a pot or mould, often pewter, packed in a tub of ice and salt and worked by hand. A domestic churn does the same job; the instruction to "let the cream remain in the ice until wanted" simply means hold it below freezing, which is the freezer.
- Yield and costA quart mould, so eight modest servings. The three shillings is the retail cost in the book's own day and is of historical interest only.
Mille fruit — literally "thousand fruit" — is the French-influenced name for what English confectioners more often called tutti-frutti: a plain ice loaded with chopped candied fruit at the end of churning, so the pieces stay whole and visible. Cassell's places it among the cream ices of a period when a well-run household with an ice house, or an account with an ice merchant importing lake ice from Norway and North America, could serve frozen desserts through the summer. The recipe uses no eggs: an uncooked cream ice like this one was quicker to make than a boiled custard. Grape-syrup, now largely gone from British kitchens, does the sweetening.