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Strawberry Water Ice
Pick a pound of ripe strawberries, and bruise them well with half a pound of red currants. Pour upon them a pint of clarified sugar, and add two or three drops of cochineal if liked. Rub the whole through a hair sieve into a basin, and freeze in the usual way.
A sorbet in Victorian dress: fruit, acid, sugar syrup, no dairy. Two of its four instructions are shorthand that no longer means anything obvious, so start there.
- "Clarified sugar" is syrup, not sugarIt means a sugar syrup boiled and skimmed (often with egg white) until clear. Dissolve about 1 lb (2 cups) sugar in 1 pint water, bring to a boil, skim, and cool completely; this makes rather more than a pint, so measure out the pint the recipe wants. Modern sugar needs no clarifying; the point of the step was to remove impurities from unrefined loaf sugar.
- The syrup ratio is the hingeA pound and a half of fruit to a pint of sugar syrup gives a high proportion of sugar in the finished mix, which is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than solid. If you reduce the sugar for a sharper flavour, expect a harder block and let it temper 10 minutes before serving.
- Red currants are doing real workThey are not decoration. They supply acid and pectin, which sharpen the strawberry and give the ice body. If currants are unavailable, substitute a comparable weight of fresh cranberries or add the juice of one to two lemons, tasting as you go.
- CochinealA red colouring made from the dried insect Dactylopius coccus, sold today as carmine or E120. It is still legal and still used, but it is not vegetarian. The strawberries and currants will give plenty of colour on their own; the drops were cosmetic, for fruit that came out pale.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine sieve of the period, and said to have been preferred for fruit because metal reacted with the acid. Any fine nylon sieve or a chinois does the same job. Press hard with a ladle and discard the seeds and skins.
- "Freeze in the usual way"To the original reader this meant a metal freezing pot packed in a tub of crushed ice and coarse salt, scraped and worked with a spatula for 20-30 minutes. An ice cream machine is a direct replacement. Without one, freeze in a shallow tray and whisk thoroughly every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Chill before churningThe mixture must be refrigerator-cold before it goes into the machine. Warm syrup poured over fruit and churned straight away produces coarse ice crystals.
- YieldAbout 1 quart, serving four to six. Best on the day it is made; after 24 hours it sets hard and the fresh strawberry flavour flattens.
Water ices reached English cookbooks by way of France and Italy, where flavoured ices were established court confectionery well before they became domestic. One reason such a recipe could sit in a general household dictionary was the supply of ice: through the second half of the century the commercial ice trade, natural ice cut from lakes and shipped in insulated holds, and later mechanical plants, brought a block of ice within reach of a middle-class kitchen. Hence the airy "freeze in the usual way" -- the book assumed its readers owned or could borrow a freezing pot and knew that salt lowers the melting point of ice enough to draw heat out of the fruit. The pairing of strawberries with red currants is a fruit-cook's habit rather than an invention: currants ripen alongside strawberries in the English garden and bring the acidity and setting power that strawberries lack, which is why the same duo turns up in Victorian jams, jellies and summer puddings.