Home › The Principles of Cookery › Raspberry Cream Ice
Raspberry Cream Ice
Mix a pound of fresh ripe raspberries with the juice of a lemon, half a pound of powdered sugar, and a pint and a half of thick cream, or, if preferred, a pint of cream and half a pint of milk. Beat the mixture in a basin, rub it through a sieve, freeze in the usual way, and leave it in the ice-pail till it is wanted. If more convenient, raspberry jam or raspberry jelly may be used instead of the fresh fruit, and when this is done very little sugar will be required. A still more agreeable and refreshing ice-cream may be made with two portions of red currants mixed with one portion of raspberries instead of raspberries alone.
A Philadelphia-style ice with no eggs and no cooking: fruit, sugar, lemon and cream, sieved and churned. The only real work is the sieving and the freezing.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint and a half is 30 fl oz, roughly 3 3/4 US cups. A pound of raspberries is about 3 1/2 cups whole berries.
- "Powdered sugar"In a British book of this date this means granulated sugar ground fine, i.e. caster sugar, not modern confectioner's sugar with its cornstarch. Use 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons caster or superfine sugar for the half pound.
- "Thick cream"The nearest modern equivalent is double cream (today about 48% butterfat). Heavy or whipping cream is the closest supermarket substitute; the milk variant lowers the fat and will give an icier result.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThis is the hinge. There is no cooked base, so stir the sugar into the fruit and lemon juice and let it stand 20 minutes until no grains remain before the cream goes in. Undissolved sugar reads as grittiness after freezing.
- SievingPush the sweetened fruit through a fine sieve before adding the cream, not after — the seeds come out more cleanly from a thin purée, and you avoid working cream through the mesh. Press hard; discard only dry seeds and skin.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The Victorian method was a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt. An ice cream machine does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow tray and beat thoroughly every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- The ice-pailHolding it in ice and salt keeps the ice at serving consistency. A domestic freezer runs colder, so move the container to the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes before scooping.
- Jam instead of fruitRaspberry jam is at least half sugar by weight, so if you substitute a pound of jam omit nearly all the added sugar and keep the lemon juice, which is what stops the whole thing tasting flat.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Cream ices reached English tables well before mechanical refrigeration, on the back of the nineteenth-century natural ice trade: lake ice cut in Norway and North America, shipped in insulated holds and stored in ice-houses and ice-wells, then sold by the block to households and confectioners. That trade, together with the cheap hand-cranked freezing pail patented in the United States in the 1840s, may help explain why a general household dictionary like Cassell's could treat freezing as something done "in the usual way" and needing no explanation. The recipe's uncooked, eggless base is what later American usage came to call Philadelphia style, and it suits raspberries particularly well, since a custard blunts their perfume. The closing suggestion of two parts red currant to one of raspberry is sound Victorian practice rather than thrift: currants carry sharp acidity and pectin, and the pairing of the two fruits runs through English preserve and pudding cookery of the period.