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Strawberry Ice Made with Jam
Although strawberry ices may be made with jam for convenience, they will not equal in flavour those made with fresh fruit. Take half a pound of strawberry jam; mix with it a pint of cream, or milk and cream mixed, and the strained juice of a lemon. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve into the freezing-pot, and freeze in the usual way. Put it into a mould, set it again in ice, and let it remain until wanted.
A convenience recipe from the era before year-round fruit: jam supplies both the fruit and the sugar, so the whole thing is three ingredients and a sieve. The proportions still work in a modern machine.
- The measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so read this as roughly 1 1/4 lb of dairy against 8 oz (225 g) of jam. If you use US cups, about 2 1/2 cups of cream to a generous 3/4 cup of jam is close to the same ratio.
- "Milk and cream mixed"All double or heavy cream will freeze very rich and rather heavy; half cream and half whole milk churns lighter, and the recipe itself offers the mixed version as an alternative. Anything leaner than that will freeze icy, since there is no egg yolk or stabiliser here.
- Sieving is not optionalRubbing the mixture through a fine sieve removes the strawberry seeds and any lumps of set jam, both of which are unpleasant in a frozen mixture. Warm the jam slightly with a spoonful of the milk first and it will pass through much more easily.
- Sweetness variesModern jams differ enormously in sugar content, and this recipe has no other sweetening. Taste the unfrozen mixture: it should be distinctly sweeter than you want the finished ice, because freezing mutes sugar and acid alike.
- The lemon juiceIt is there to cut the flatness of cooked jam, not to set anything. One lemon to a pint is right; the acid also helps keep the colour from going brown-pink.
- The freezing-potThis means a pewter or tin sorbetière packed in a pail of ice and coarse salt, turned and scraped by hand. An ice-cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and beat thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes until set, or the ice will be coarse and grainy.
- Moulding and ripening"Set it again in ice" is the holding and hardening stage: it firms the moulded ice and keeps it until it is wanted. A covered container in the freezer for two to three hours does this. Because there are no stabilisers, it will freeze hard: move it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before serving.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 pints of finished ice, enough for six small servings.
The recipe is honest about the compromise in the very first sentence, and that candour is the interesting part: strawberries were a brief midsummer crop, but jam kept all year, so a jam ice let a household serve something festive in January. Ices themselves had moved down the social scale over the nineteenth century as ice became a traded commodity, shipped from Norwegian and North American lakes and stored in ice-houses and ice-wells; the domestic freezing-pot packed with ice and salt made a frozen dish possible in an ordinary kitchen. The freezing point of a salt-and-ice mixture drops well below that of water, which is what allows the cream inside the pot to freeze, and the constant turning and scraping the recipe calls "the usual way" is simply the hand-work that keeps the ice crystals small.