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Cherry Ice
Stone and mash two quarts of cherries and place over them one quart of sugar and a wineglass of claret. Let stand five or six hours, adding to them the crushed kernels of ten cherries. Strain and freeze.
Or, use the syrup from stewed or spiced cherries. For sherbet add the usual whipped whites of eggs. (See Introductory Recipes.)
A late-Victorian water ice built on macerated cherries, claret and a large amount of sugar. Two elements of it are not made today, and both matter.
- The crushed kernelsCherry kernels contain amygdalin, which can release hydrogen cyanide once the kernel is crushed and left in contact with moisture, which is what a five- or six-hour maceration does. Old cooks used them deliberately, for the bitter-almond character associated with noyau. Ten kernels is a small quantity and the mixture is strained before freezing, but the dose is unmeasured and modern practice is to leave them out.
- The raw egg whitesThe sherbet variation sends you to the book's "Introductory Recipes" for whipped whites folded into the frozen base. Those whites are never heated at any point. Uncooked egg white carries a salmonella risk that the period did not recognise; a current sherbet or sorbet recipe should be used instead.
- What a wineglass meantIn American cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, or a quarter cup — not a modern stemmed glass. Claret is dry red Bordeaux, or any dry red in practice.
- The sugar ratio is not a mistakeA quart of sugar to two quarts of fruit looks extreme, but hand-cranked ices needed that much sugar to stay scoopable in a salt-and-ice freezer rather than setting into a solid block. Modern churns and freezers change the arithmetic entirely.
- "Strain and freeze"This assumed a pail-and-dasher freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt, cranked until the mixture set. The recipe gives no times or temperatures.
- YieldTwo quarts of cherries with a quart of sugar makes a large batch, but the mixture is strained before freezing and the finished volume is not stated.
Cherry Ice belongs to the run of fruit ices that filled late nineteenth-century American cookbooks once the hand-cranked freezer became a common kitchen fixture; a water ice was cheaper than an ice cream, used no scarce cream, and made a virtue of a glut of summer fruit. The kernel trick is older than the freezer. European confectioners had long flavoured cherry preparations with the crushed stones to deepen the fruit with a bitter-almond edge — the same principle behind ratafia, crème de noyau and the Italian practice of cracking a few apricot kernels into jam — and cookbook writers of this period passed the instruction along without comment. The alternative offered here, using up the syrup from stewed or spiced cherries, is the more revealing line: it shows the book's frugal instinct, in which nothing sweet was poured away while a freezer stood in the pantry.