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Mille Fruit Ice Cream
Rasp 2 lemons, take the juice of them, 1 glass of wine, 1 of grape syrup, 1 pint of thick cream, and 8 ounces of powdered sugar. Mix and freeze, and when sufficiently congealed add 4 ounces of preserved fruits, which cut small, and mix well with the ice. Let the cream remain in the ice until wanted.
A late-Victorian still-frozen cream, flavoured with lemon, wine and grape syrup and studded with candied fruit. It is essentially a no-cook custard-free ice, so success rests entirely on how you handle the acid and the freezing.
- "Rasp 2 lemons"Rasping meant rubbing the whole lemon against a grater or a lump of sugar to strip the coloured oil-bearing zest. Fine-grated zest from two lemons, or zest rubbed into part of the sugar, gives the same result; avoid the white pith.
- Acid and creamLemon juice will thicken and can curdle cream outright. Whisk the sugar and zest into the cream first, then add the juice slowly at the end while stirring, and freeze at once rather than letting the mixture stand.
- "1 glass of wine"A wine glass in recipes of this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, roughly 1/4 cup. A sweet white or Madeira suits the other flavourings; bear in mind that alcohol lowers the freezing point, so increasing it may leave the ice softer.
- Grape syrupBoiled-down grape must, sold today as grape molasses, pekmez or vin cotto. Ordinary grape jelly thinned with a little water is the nearest supermarket substitute; grape juice alone is too weak.
- FreezingAn ice-cream machine handles this directly. "Sufficiently congealed" means the stage of soft-serve, thick enough to hold a trail from the paddle but still workable.
- Adding the fruitFold in the 4 oz of chopped candied or preserved fruit only after churning. Added earlier it sinks and the sugar in it slows the freeze; chop it no larger than a pea so it does not freeze into hard nuggets.
- "Let the cream remain in the ice"The original means packing the sealed canister in a bucket of ice and coarse salt to ripen. A freezer at 0F does the same job; give it two to three hours to firm, then temper 10 minutes at room temperature before serving.
- YieldThe cream together with the lemon juice, wine, grape syrup, sugar and fruit already comes to well over a pint of mixture before churning, so expect appreciably more than 1 1/2 pints of finished ice.
The name is Anglicised French — mille fruits, "a thousand fruits" — the sort of label a nineteenth-century confectioner used for an ice or pudding shot through with chopped candied fruit, alongside the Italian tutti frutti. It belongs to the era when preserved citron, cherries and angelica were ordinary pantry goods rather than Christmas-cake decoration, and when grape syrup boiled down from must was still in use as a sweetener. The instruction to leave the finished cream packed in ice until wanted points to a kitchen supplied with block ice rather than a mechanical freezer; ripening in the salt-and-ice pack was both storage and the final stage of the recipe.