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STRAWBERRY CREAM ICE (a la Muscovite)
Pick the strawberries, bruise them with a wooden spoon, and rub them through a fine hair sieve. Take one pint of the juice thus obtained, and stir into it until dissolved five ounces of powdered sugar. Dissolve half an ounce of gelatine in very little water, and add this to the juice. Let the basin containing the juice stand upon rough ice, and stir its contents without stopping until they begin to set. Whip a pint of cream, and mix it lightly with the iced strawberry-juice. Turn the whole into an hermetically-closing ice-mould. Put a little butter round the opening to keep out the water, and place the mould in the ice-pail with pounded ice and bay salt round it at least three inches thick. Let it remain until the cream is thoroughly frozen. When it is to be served, plunge the mould for one instant into a basin of hot water, turn it upside down upon a glass dish, when the ice will in all probability come out in a shape. If, however, it will not come out, dip it quickly into hot water. Time to freeze, about two hours.
A gelatine-set strawberry mousse frozen in a sealed mould rather than churned — closer to a semifreddo than to modern ice cream. The technique translates cleanly if you understand what the ice-pail was doing.
- The hinge: stir the juice only until it begins to setThe gelatine must be on the point of thickening before the whipped cream goes in, or the cream sinks and you get a layer of sweet ice under a layer of foam. Stir over ice water and watch for the juice to coat the spoon, then fold immediately.
- Quantities and yieldOne pint of sieved juice needs roughly 2 to 2.5 lb of hulled strawberries. With a pint of cream folded in, the finished mixture is about 1.5 quarts — eight to ten servings.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is, by weight, about two envelopes (roughly 4.5 tsp) of modern powdered gelatine. Nineteenth-century gelatine was less consistently refined and may well have been weaker than the modern product, so bloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water, warm it just to clear, and consider using nearer 1.5 envelopes for a mousse that is set but not bouncy.
- SugarFive ounces is a scant 3/4 cup of caster or superfine sugar. It does double duty here: it sweetens and it keeps the frozen mixture from setting bone-hard. Reducing it much will give you a brick.
- The ice-pail and bay saltBay salt is coarse sea salt; packed with pounded ice around the mould it takes the bath well below freezing, cold enough to set the mixture hard, which is how a Victorian kitchen froze anything solid. A modern freezer does the same job -- use a metal mould or loaf tin, press cling film to the surface, and allow 4 to 6 hours rather than two.
- Hermetically-closing mouldThese were pewter or copper moulds with a tight lid, sealed with butter at the seam so brine could not seep in. If you are freezing in a domestic freezer the butter seal is unnecessary; the point was keeping salt water out, not air.
- UnmouldingOne instant in hot water means a second or two, no more. A damp cloth wrung out in hot water and held against the mould for ten seconds is more controllable and will not melt the outer surface to slush.
- ServingLet it stand five minutes at room temperature before slicing. Frozen gelatine mixtures are dense and taste of very little straight from deep cold.
Cassell's uses à la Muscovite loosely to mean an iced cream frozen still in a sealed mould rather than churned in a sorbetière — one of a family of Russian-flavoured names attached to dishes of varying connection to Russia. The distinction mattered practically: churned ices were worked with a spatula against the sides of the freezing pot and came out soft, while a moulded ice like this one was left undisturbed in the ice-pail and depended on gelatine and whipped cream for its texture, since nothing was stirring the mixture to keep the crystals small. That the book takes the ice-pail, the pounded ice and the bay salt for granted is a reminder of how much ice a well-run late-nineteenth-century household got through; the commercial ice trade, shipping lake ice from Norway and North America, made desserts like this ordinary in a way they had not been two generations earlier.