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Water Ices
Water ices are made of the juices of ripe fruits mixed with syrup and frozen; and it must be remembered that if the juices are sweetened excessively they will not freeze. It is, therefore, necessary to test them with an instrument called a saccharometer. To do this, put the mixture prepared for freezing into a tumbler, place the saccharometer gently in it: if it is mixed correctly for freezing with powder it will stick to the highest red mark; for freezing with ice and salt to the lowest red mark. To make it sink, add water to the mixture; to make it rise, add syrup. These remarks apply also to ice creams, ice puddings, and all drinks which are to be frozen. For water ices clarified sugar should be used; and this may be made by boiling for ten minutes, and skimming thoroughly, a quart of water with three pounds of sugar and half the white of an egg well whisked. Having prepared the mixture and also ascertained its strength, put it into an ice-pot. Place it in the ice-pail, and surround it with ice which has been broken almost to powder and mixed with salt and a little saltpetre. Work the freezer rapidly for ten minutes; then remove the ice from the sides of the freezer with the ice-spattle, and work it again till it is stiff and smooth. Put it into the mould, and leave it in ice mixed with salt and saltpetre till it is to be served. To turn it out, wipe it with a cloth, dip it in cold water for a minute, and wipe it dry; lift off the lids of the mould, and with the fingers push the ice upon its dish.
This is the general method for water ices rather than a single flavour, and it assumes a hand-cranked pail freezer and a confectioner's saccharometer. The chemistry it describes is sound; the equipment has changed.
- The hinge: sugar concentrationEverything here turns on the warning that an over-sweetened juice will not freeze. Sugar depresses the freezing point, so a syrup that tastes right at room temperature may never set harder than slush. Modern sorbet practice generally lands somewhere around 25-30 per cent sugar by weight in the finished mix; a refractometer or hydrometer reading in that same range (roughly 25-30 Brix) does the job the saccharometer's red marks did.
- "Freezing with powder"The two red marks refer to two different chilling methods. "Powder" most likely means one of the freezing mixtures sold for the purpose, which may have run colder than a plain ice-and-salt pail and so allowed a sweeter, denser mix. With a domestic machine, work to the lower figure.
- The clarified sugarThree pounds of sugar to a quart of water is a heavy syrup, about 1.36 kg to an imperial quart (1.14 litres). Kept as a stock syrup and diluted into fruit juice, it is the base the recipe calls for in water ices. The half white of egg is there to coagulate and carry off impurities in nineteenth-century sugar; with modern granulated sugar you can skip it and simply bring the syrup to a boil until clear.
- Ice-pot, ice-pail, spattleThe ice-pot (or sorbetière) is the inner metal canister holding the mixture; the ice-pail is the outer bucket of ice and salt. The spattle is a long scraper for pulling frozen crystals off the canister wall and stirring them back in — exactly what the dasher of a modern churn does continuously.
- Salt and saltpetreRock salt at roughly one part to three parts crushed ice by weight will take the bath down to around -10C. The saltpetre is a period addition believed to drive the temperature lower still; it is unnecessary and can be left out.
- Ten minutes, then againThe two-stage working is not padding. The first churn builds the crystal structure, the scraping-down redistributes it, and the second working is what produces a smooth rather than granular ice. In a modern machine, run to soft-serve consistency, then transfer to a container and firm up in the freezer for an hour or two.
- Moulding and holdingHeld in a domestic freezer at -18C a water ice will set far harder than it did in a salted ice pail. Move a moulded ice to the refrigerator for 15-20 minutes before turning out, and dip the mould briefly in cold — not warm — water as directed.
- YieldThe syrup as given makes a quantity of stock syrup enough for several batches. A finished quart of water ice will serve roughly six to eight.
Water ices reached English cookery books by way of Italian and then French confectioners, and by the 1870s and 1880s ices were expected of any household with pretensions, not just of the professional pastry cook. The salt-and-ice freezing bath had been understood in Europe since the sixteenth century, and saltpetre appears in the earliest of those descriptions as a supposed intensifier of the cold — a survival that lingers in Victorian instructions like this one long after ordinary rock salt had proved sufficient. The saccharometer is the more telling detail: it marks the moment when confectionery began borrowing instruments from the brewer and the sugar refiner. A cook working without one had no way to know whether a mix would set until the pail had already been cranked for ten minutes.