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Mille Fruit Water-Ice
To half a pint of water and a pint of clarified sugar, add half a pint of sherry and grape-syrup, mixed--there should be two-thirds of the latter--the strained juice of five lemons and of a large orange, and the grated rinds of two lemons. Mix, and set the mixture to freeze. When sufficiently congealed, put some preserved fruit--about four ounces to this quantity will be enough--amongst the ice, and finish the freezing. Large fruit should be cut small.
A Victorian wine-and-fruit water ice, built on a heavy sugar syrup and frozen in a pail packed with ice and salt. The proportions are workable on a modern machine, but several of the terms need translating first.
- Read the measures as imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (roughly 1 1/4 US cups) and a pint is 2 1/2 US cups. Scaled up, the batch comes to something over a litre before the fruit goes in.
- Clarified sugarThis is not a modern product but a stock syrup: sugar dissolved in water, boiled, and skimmed clear (older kitchens used beaten egg white to lift the scum). A dense syrup of about two parts sugar to one part water by weight is the usual reading, though the book gives no density, so the exact sweetness is a matter of judgement.
- The sherry and grape syrup splitThe half pint is a mixture, two-thirds of it grape syrup and one-third sherry, so about 3 1/3 fl oz sherry to 6 2/3 fl oz syrup. Grape syrup means concentrated unfermented grape must; boiled-down white grape juice, or the Middle Eastern grape molasses sold as pekmez, stands in for it.
- Alcohol and freezingThe sherry, together with the heavy sugar syrup, lowers the freezing point, so the ice stays soft and will not set rock hard. Adding more sherry risks leaving the mixture at a slush; if it refuses to firm at all, suspect either too heavy a syrup or too warm a freezer.
- The rindsGrated zest left loose in the base can leave a slightly fibrous texture. If you would rather avoid that, steep the zest in the warm syrup and strain it out before chilling, which keeps the oils without the pieces.
- Chill before churningThe base should be refrigerator-cold before it goes into the machine. Poured in at room temperature it churns long, incorporates air, and ends up closer to a sorbet foam than the dense water ice intended here.
- Preserved fruitFour ounces of candied or glace fruit, cut to pea size, and only when the ice is already thick. Added at the start it sinks and freezes to gravel; added at the end it stays suspended. Rinsing off the surface syrup keeps it from bleeding colour.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 quarts. Water ices of this kind were often served in stemmed glasses between courses or after the roast rather than scooped in bowls.
Mille fruit is "thousand fruit", a confectioner's name for an ice studded with many small pieces of preserved fruit, a cousin of the better-known tutti frutti. Cassell's places it among water ices rather than cream ices, the distinction being that a water ice is built on sugar syrup, wine and juice with no dairy at all, which made it the lighter option in a long Victorian dinner and one often sent to table between courses. The sherry and grape syrup here are doing double duty: they flavour the ice, but they also depress its freezing point, something confectioners exploited in practice before it was set down as chemistry. Freezing was laborious: the mixture was frozen in a metal sorbetiere set in a pail of broken ice and coarse salt, worked by hand with a spatula or in a crank freezer, which is why the recipe can pause at "sufficiently congealed" to fold in the fruit.