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Raspberry Water Ice
Press out the juice from some fresh rasp-berries, and with each pint of juice mix a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and half a pound of loaf sugar boiled to a syrup with a quarter of a pint of water. Put the preparation in a freezing pot, and freeze in the usual way. To obtain the juice of the raspberries, put a pound of fruit into a saucepan with two table-spoonfuls of sugar and two table-spoonfuls of water. Stir the fruit till it boils, rub it through a sieve, and it will be ready for use. A water-ice made with equal portions of raspberries and red currants is superior in flavour to one made with raspberries alone.
A straightforward sorbet whose success rests entirely on the sugar-to-juice ratio, which the original states in imperial measures and pre-metric sugar forms. A few translations make it workable in a modern churn.
- Do the juice firstThe instruction to press out juice comes first but depends on the method given at the end: cook 1 lb raspberries with 2 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp water until boiling, then sieve. Read the recipe backwards and start there.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not the US 16 oz. A quarter pint is 5 fl oz (150 ml) and a dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons.
- Loaf sugarHalf a pound (225 g) of loaf sugar means sugar broken from a hard refined cone; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weighed rather than measured by cup.
- Yield of juiceThe recipe does not say how much juice a pound of fruit gives. Cooked and sieved, a pound of raspberries is likely to fall somewhat short of a full imperial pint of thick juice, so check the volume and either scale the syrup down proportionally or cook more fruit to reach a pint.
- The syrupBoil the sugar with the water only until fully dissolved and slightly thickened, then cool it completely before combining. Adding warm syrup to the juice dulls the fresh raspberry flavour.
- Sieve, don't blendRubbing through a sieve removes the seeds, which is the whole point; a blender will pulverise them and leave the ice gritty. Press hard with a ladle and discard the seed mass.
- "Freeze in the usual way"The freezing pot was a metal canister set in a pail of ice and coarse salt and turned by hand. A domestic ice-cream machine does the same job 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.
- Sugar and textureThe ratio matters: too little sugar and the ice freezes into a solid block, too much and it never sets firm. If you reduce the sugar for a sharper flavour, expect a harder, icier result and let it soften for ten minutes before serving.
- The redcurrant variantThe suggestion at the end is sound. Redcurrants bring acidity and a good deal of pectin, which may give the finished ice a slightly smoother body. Cook and sieve them with the raspberries.
- Yield and servingA pint of juice plus the syrup makes something nearer a pint and a half of mixture, enough for six small glasses. Serve it the day it is made; without eggs or cream it hardens considerably after a night in a modern freezer.
Water ices reached the English table by way of Italy and France, and the vocabulary followed: the sorbetière or freezing pot was a lidded pewter or tin canister packed in a wooden pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, the salt lowering the ice's melting point enough to freeze the contents while the cook turned and scraped the canister by hand. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century, ice was becoming a commodity rather than a luxury — cut on northern lakes, shipped in insulated holds, and sold from urban ice wells — which may be why a book aimed at ordinary households could assume its readers knew what "freeze in the usual way" meant. Raspberries were a common flavouring for ices, British soft fruit being abundant and cheap in July, and currants were often grown alongside raspberries, their acidity and setting power already familiar from jam-making.