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Currant Ice Cream
Partly freeze the cream or custard before adding currant juice. Where fresh or canned currants are not to be had two teaspoons of currant jelly and juice of one lemon may be used for each pint of the frozen mixture (cream, custard, or ice).
This is a note appended to a larger ice cream chapter rather than a standalone formula, so it assumes you already have a cream or custard base and an ice-and-salt freezer at hand. The instructions that matter are about when the acid goes in, not how much.
- Why partial freezing firstCurrant juice is sharply acidic, and the likely reason for adding it late is to keep it from curdling the dairy base, especially a warm one. Churn until the mixture is thick and slushy — soft-serve stage — before pouring in the juice.
- The base is assumed"Cream or custard" here means either sweetened heavy cream or a cooked egg custard from earlier in the chapter. The recipe gives no quantities for the fresh-currant version; sugar and strained juice are left to the cook.
- Sweeten heavilyRed currants run around 2.5 to 3 percent acid, and cold blunts sweetness considerably. A mixture that tastes slightly too sweet at room temperature will taste correct frozen.
- The jelly substituteTwo teaspoons of jelly per pint is a very light hand; it will give colour and a suggestion of currant more than a real one. Warm the jelly to loosen it and stir it into the lemon juice before adding, or it will stay in threads.
- Strain the juiceFresh currants should be crushed and pressed through a jelly bag or fine sieve. Skins and seeds do not soften in a freezer and give the finished cream a gritty edge.
- Machine and timingA modern compressor or frozen-bowl churn reaches the slushy stage in roughly 15 to 20 minutes; add the juice then and churn 5 minutes more. Ripen in the freezer at least two hours before serving.
- YieldA pint of base makes only a few servings once churned. Currant ice is intensely flavoured and small portions suit it.
Red and white currants were a standard kitchen-garden fruit in Britain and the northern United States through the nineteenth century, valued because they set firm jelly without added pectin and because they ripened in a gap between strawberries and the late summer stone fruit. Their near-disappearance from American markets is usually traced to the early twentieth-century bans on Ribes planting, imposed because currants and gooseberries host white pine blister rust; federal restrictions were lifted in the 1960s but many states kept their own, and the fruit never regained a place in the produce aisle. That is why a book of this vintage can treat fresh currants as an ordinary summer ingredient while offering a jelly-and-lemon fallback in the same breath.