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Currant Ice and Sherbet
To each quart of juice allow a pound of sugar. Let gently heat till sugar is melted when cool and freeze. Serve with stemmed currants sprinkled over the ice in sherbet glasses. Sweet raspberry syrup will lessen the tartness and give variation of flavour. For sherbet add the usual whipped whites of eggs (see Introductory Recipes).
A two-ingredient water ice that depends almost entirely on the quality of the juice and on how cold the mixture is churned. The key restraint is heat: the syrup is warmed only until the sugar dissolves, never boiled.
- The proportions in cupsA quart of juice is 4 cups; a pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. That works out to roughly 30 percent sugar by weight, which is what keeps the finished ice scoopable rather than solid.
- Getting a quart of juiceRed currants run very juicy. Figure 3 to 3 1/2 lb of stemmed fruit, crushed and warmed briefly, then dripped through a jelly bag for a clear quart. Do not press hard if you want the ice to stay bright and clear rather than cloudy.
- Do not let it boilWarming the juice past the point where the sugar dissolves cooks out the fresh flavour, and with a fruit as pectin-rich as currants prolonged boiling can thicken the mixture. Take it off the heat as soon as no grit remains on a spoon.
- "Freeze" means churnThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Chill the syrup thoroughly, then run it in an ice cream machine for 20 to 25 minutes. Without a machine, still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes until it is uniformly grainy.
- Adjusting the tartnessCurrant juice is sharply acidic, and the raspberry syrup suggested here is doing real work beyond flavour. Start with 1/2 cup of syrup per quart of juice and reduce the sugar slightly to compensate.
- The egg whites, and pasteurisationThe sherbet variation folds soft-beaten whites into the partly frozen ice to lighten it; the recipe gives no quantity, referring the reader to the Introductory Recipes. Since they are never heated, use pasteurised whites or reconstituted meringue powder, or skip the step and serve it as the ice.
- Yield and servingA quart of juice with its sugar makes about 1 1/4 quarts of ice, enough for six sherbet glasses. Let it sit a few minutes out of the freezer before scooping, and stem the garnish currants only at the last moment so they do not weep.
Currants were a fixture of nineteenth-century American and British kitchen gardens: prolific, reliably hardy, and so high in acid and pectin that they went mainly into jelly, shrub and summer drinks. Their near-disappearance from American cooking is generally traced to the early twentieth century, when Ribes plantings were banned in many states as host to white pine blister rust, a restriction that outlived the recipes written for the fruit. The distinction this page draws between an ice and a sherbet is one of several in use at the time, period usage being inconsistent: here an ice is nothing but sweetened juice frozen hard, while a sherbet has beaten egg white or milk worked in to soften the texture. The word itself comes through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharba, a drink, and in older English usage it still meant a chilled sweet-sour beverage rather than anything spooned from a glass.ferrying that name onto frozen fruit was a later, largely nineteenth-century habit.