Fig Ice
Peel two quarts of fresh figs and stir well with the juice of one lemon and its grated peel, or one teaspoon lemon extract, some fruit acid and two cups of sugar. Add two cups of water and freeze.
A water ice rather than an ice cream: fruit, sugar, acid and water, frozen with agitation. The original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and salt, and it assumes you know to mash the figs to a pulp.
- Two quarts of figsMeasured by volume, whole and peeled, this is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of fresh figs, or about 20 to 30 medium fruit.
- "Stir well" means puréeRipe peeled figs will not smooth out with a spoon alone. Mash or blend them to a pulp before the sugar goes in; the seeds stay, which is expected in fig ice, but stringy skin fragments are not.
- PeelingOnly worth doing with thick-skinned figs. If the skins are thin and tender, leave them on and press the purée through a sieve instead.
- "Some fruit acid"This meant tartaric or citric acid, commonly sold in crystals by grocers of the period, and the quantity is genuinely unspecified. A scant 1/4 teaspoon of citric acid, or a second lemon's juice, does the same work: figs are very low in acid and the ice tastes flat without it.
- Lemon extract is not lemonThe extract supplies aroma but no acidity. If you use it rather than the fresh lemon, the fruit acid becomes essential rather than optional.
- Sugar is structuralTwo cups against two cups water looks heavy, but sugar is what keeps a water ice from setting into a solid block. Do not reduce it much unless the figs are extremely ripe, and dissolve it fully before freezing.
- FreezingChill the mixture thoroughly, then churn in an ice cream machine for 20 to 25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
Fig ice belongs to the long family of water ices — fruit, sugar, water, no dairy — that American cookbooks kept separate from cream ices and sherbets well into the twentieth century. Fresh figs are impossible to hold: they bruise within a day or two of ripeness and were, before refrigerated freight, largely a local or garden crop, so recipe writers offered every route to using a glut at once, from preserves and drying to ices. The "fruit acid" called for so casually here is a reminder of how differently the household pantry was stocked: crystalline tartaric and citric acid were ordinary shelf items, used to sharpen bland fruit, help jellies set and stand in for lemons out of season. Figs, cultivated around the Mediterranean since antiquity and later established in the American South and in California, are sweet enough that this correction is not a refinement but a necessity.