Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pomegranate Water Ice
Pomegranate Water Ice
Take the ruby pips from two ripe pomegranates, place them on a fine sieve over a basin, and bruise them well with the back of a wooden spoon to draw out the juice. With half a pint of this mix half a pint of strong syrup, the juice of a large fresh lemon, two or three drops of cochineal, a table-spoonful of orange-flower water, and two or three large lumps of sugar which have been rubbed upon the rind of an orange, and crushed to powder; freeze in the usual way. Time, about twenty minutes to prepare. Probable cost, best pomegranates, 4d. to 1s. each. Sufficient for a little more than a pint of water ice.
A Victorian sorbet built on fresh pomegranate juice, with the sugar carried in a pre-made syrup rather than dissolved into the fruit. Most of the work is juicing and balancing; the freezing is the easy part.
- How many pomegranatesTwo fruit rarely give half a pint (about 285 ml) of juice; expect roughly 100-130 ml each from good specimens, so buy three or four. Bruise the arils gently through the sieve as directed and stop before you crush the pale membrane, which is bitter and astringent.
- "Strong syrup"Probably a stock sugar syrup of the kind kept ready in confectioners' kitchens; period recipes vary in strength, from roughly equal weights of sugar and water upwards. If it is the equal-weights sort, half a pint of it with half a pint of juice gives a sorbet of around 25 percent sugar, on the sweet side but enough to keep it scoopable rather than solid.
- Sugar rubbed on the orangeRubbing lump sugar over the zest until it is stained and fragrant is the old way of making oleo-saccharum and it extracts orange oil far better than grating. A tablespoon or so of caster sugar worked with the zest of one orange does the same job.
- CochinealA red colouring made from dried scale insects, sold then as a liquid tincture. It is still permitted as carmine or E120, though pomegranate juice from ripe fruit usually needs no help; skip it unless your juice has come out pale pink.
- Orange-flower waterSold now as orange blossom water and much stronger in some Middle Eastern brands than in the mild European sort. Start with a teaspoon, taste, and add the rest only if it does not dominate.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The original assumes freezing in a pot packed in a pail of ice and coarse salt, whether an old-style sorbetiere or a hand-cranked freezer, worked and scraped as it sets. An ice-cream machine churns it in 20-30 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Balance before freezingCold mutes both sweetness and acid, so the unfrozen mixture should taste slightly too sweet and slightly too sharp. Adjust with lemon juice or a little more syrup at this stage, not after.
- YieldA little over a pint, as stated, which serves four as a small dessert or six as a palate cleanser. It is best eaten within a day or two before the fruit flavour dulls.
Water ices reached English cookery books by way of France and Italy, and by the later nineteenth century a freezer packed with ice and salt was familiar kitchen equipment. Pomegranates were an imported fruit, sold singly rather than by weight, and the price note here (fourpence to a shilling each) marks them as a luxury. The pairing with orange-flower water points to the older Anglo-French confectionery tradition, where floral distillates rather than vanilla did the perfuming; grenadine, the pomegranate syrup that later carried the flavour into bar work, takes its name from the French grenade for the fruit. The instruction to add cochineal is a reminder that Victorian cooks were ready to treat colour as an ingredient in its own right.