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Peach Water Ice
Pare, stone, and quarter half a dozen ripe peaches; put them in a syrup, made by boiling for five minutes a pound of loaf sugar, with a pint of water, the white of an egg beaten to a firm froth, and one peach kernel. Let the peaches simmer until they are quite soft. Press them through a fine hair-sieve, and add to the liquid the strained juice of two small fresh lemons and two or three drops of cochineal. Freeze in the usual way. Time to boil the peaches, varying with the quality. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. with peaches at 2d. each. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A clean fruit sorbet built on a clarified sugar syrup. The proportions work as written; most of what needs translating is the equipment and the Victorian shorthand for freezing.
- The peach kernelThe kernel inside the stone contains amygdalin, which yields hydrogen cyanide, and it is here purely for its bitter-almond perfume. Leave it out and add a drop of almond extract at the end if you want that note.
- Pint and poundAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups; a pound of loaf sugar is 450 g. Loaf sugar was cane sugar broken from a cone, so ordinary granulated sugar is a direct swap.
- What the egg white is doingBeaten white boiled in the syrup is a clarifying agent: it coagulates and carries scum and impurities to the surface, where they are skimmed off. It is not there to enrich the ice, and skipping it costs you only a little clarity.
- "Freeze in the usual way"To a Victorian cook this meant a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked by hand. An ice-cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Hair sieveA sieve with a woven horsehair mesh, the standard fine sieve of the period and usually said to have been preferred for acidic fruit because it avoided the taint of iron or tinned mesh. A nylon or stainless strainer is fine now; press hard to get the pulp through, since the pulp is what gives the ice its body.
- CochinealCarmine from the cochineal insect, sold in drops as red colouring. It is still available, but it is an insect derivative and not vegan; the ice tastes the same without it, just paler.
- Cooking the peaches"Time varying with the quality" means simmer until they collapse, usually 8-12 minutes for ripe fruit and longer for firm supermarket peaches. Overripe fruit needs barely five.
- YieldFour to five servings, as the recipe states; a pint of water, a pound of sugar and six peaches make well over a pint of mix. Serve within a day or two: with no dairy or alcohol it freezes very hard, so let it stand 10 minutes before scooping.
Water ices reached English cookery books from Italy and France by way of the confectioner's trade, and by the time Cassell's was compiled they were standard summer fare in any household that could buy ice. This one belongs to the older confectionery tradition rather than the dairy one: sugar syrup, fruit purée and acid, with no cream at all. The clarifying egg white and the single peach kernel are both inherited from the sugar-boiler's craft, where clear syrup was a mark of skill and kernels were the cheap source of almond flavour, peach and apricot stones being a by-product the kitchen already had. The costing in shillings and pence, with peaches reckoned at twopence each, is typical of Cassell's, which priced every dish so a mistress could check her cook's accounts.