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Rum Ice
Rub the rind of a large fresh lemon upon three or four lumps of sugar till all the yellow part is taken off, and add as much sugar as will make up the weight to three-quarters of a pound. Put this into a saucepan with a pint of cold water and a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Stir the syrup over the fire, and when the sugar is dissolved, add gradually the whites of three eggs beaten till firm. Pour the preparation out before it begins to simmer, let it cool, add a quarter of a pint of old Jamaica rum, freeze in the usual way, and serve in glasses.
A water ice rather than a cream ice: lemon syrup, whipped egg white for body, and a generous slug of dark rum. The rum is what makes or breaks the texture, so read the freezing note first.
- Alcohol and freezingA quarter pint of rum in roughly a quart of syrup will keep the mixture soft and slushy; it may never set firm in a domestic freezer. Churn it as cold as your machine will go and serve it straight away, slightly slumped, in chilled glasses as the recipe directs.
- Imperial measuresThe pint here is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or 2½ US cups; the quarter pint of rum is 5 fl oz. Three-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1¾ cups granulated, including the lumps used on the lemon.
- Rubbing the rind on sugarThis is the old oleo-saccharum method, and it is worth doing rather than substituting grated zest. The sugar crystals abrade the peel and absorb the oil, which carries far more lemon aroma than juice does. Use an unwaxed lemon and stop as soon as the sugar is yellow and damp, before you reach the white pith.
- "Old Jamaica rum"A dark, aged pot-still Jamaican rum with pronounced ester character, not a light column-still white or a spiced rum. A modern high-ester Jamaican such as Smith & Cross or a dark Appleton is the nearest approximation to the style, though no exact equivalence to a Victorian bottling can be claimed.
- The egg whitesThey are stirred into the hot syrup, which is deliberately taken off before it simmers; this lightens the ice and helps keep it from freezing to a solid block. Because the mixture never reaches a simmer, it is not reliably pasteurised; use pasteurised whites if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- "Freeze in the usual way"In period terms, a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, scraped down with a spatula as it set. An ice cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow tray and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six to eight in small glasses. It does not keep well; the aerated egg-white body collapses after a day or two.
The book separates "ices" into cream ices and water ices, and this belongs to the second family: a sugar syrup flavoured with fruit and spirit, given body by whipped egg white rather than dairy. Rum and sugar reached British kitchens through the West Indian trade, while lemons came largely from the Mediterranean. Rum ices, punch ices and "Roman punch" sorbets were served between courses at formal dinners, in glasses. The phrase "freeze in the usual way" suggests a cook was expected to own a freezing pail and to need no instruction in packing it with ice and salt; imported ice from America and Norway had by the later nineteenth century made domestic ice cheaper.