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Raspberry Ice
Take a pint of the pressed juice of raspberries, add sugar to taste, and pour it into an ice-form; set it in the ice-pail, and stir with a silver spoon always one way till it is quite frozen through. Let the ice remain in the ice-pail till wanted. Strawberries, currants, and mulberries may all be treated in this way.
A water ice of the simplest kind: fruit juice, sugar, and constant agitation while it freezes. The whole success of it lies in the stirring, and in getting enough sugar into the juice.
- The hinge is the stirringUnstirred fruit juice freezes into a solid block of ice with the sugar concentrated at the centre. Scrape and stir it every ten to fifteen minutes as it sets, or churn it in an ice-cream machine, so the crystals stay fine.
- Sugar is not only for sweetness"Sugar to taste" understates its job — sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice scoopable. Aim for roughly 4 to 6 oz (about 1/2 to 3/4 cup) of sugar per pint of juice; less than that and you get a brick, much more and it will not set firmly.
- A pint of pressed juiceThis is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. Reckon on 2 to 2 1/2 lb of raspberries to yield it. Press through a sieve or jelly bag; the seeds are unpleasant in a smooth ice.
- The ice-form and ice-pailThe form is a lidded metal mould; the pail is the wooden bucket packed around it with crushed ice and coarse salt, which brings the temperature well below freezing. A freezer and a metal loaf tin do the same work, and an ice-cream churn does it better.
- Why silverSilver was probably specified because iron and tinned spoons could discolour acid fruit and taint the flavour. Stainless steel is inert and raises no such problem.
- Always one wayA common traditional instruction, but the direction of stirring has no bearing on the texture. Stir however is convenient.
- Holding it"Let the ice remain in the ice-pail till wanted" means keep it cold and undisturbed. In a domestic freezer a water ice hardens further over a few hours; move it to the refrigerator for 10 to 15 minutes before serving so it can be scooped.
- The other fruitsCurrants are markedly more acid and will want more sugar than raspberries; strawberry and mulberry juice are milder and benefit from a squeeze of lemon to keep them from tasting flat.
- YieldA pint of juice plus sugar gives about 1 1/4 pints of finished ice — four modest servings.
Water ices reached English tables from Italy by way of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the time Cassell's was compiled they were standard summer fare in any household that could buy or store ice. The recipe's brevity is telling: it assumes the reader already owns a pewter or copper ice-form and a salted ice-pail, and that ice itself is available — much of it cut from lakes in Norway and North America and shipped to British ports, then sold on by the block. Note also that this is a true water ice, with no cream, custard or egg. That distinction mattered in period cookery books, where cream ices were the richer and more prestigious article and fruit ices the clean, sharp thing served between courses or at the end of a hot-weather dinner. The list of substitute fruits — strawberries, currants, mulberries — is a fair index of what an English kitchen garden yielded in July.