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Frozen Cherries
Use the ripest cherries of the darkest varieties. Stone and place over them a quart of sugar to two quarts of cherries.
Let stand an hour or more; add a wineglass of Maraschino or cordial; place in freezer; pack and let stand in salt and ice six hours.
This is a still-frozen dessert — no churning, just macerated fruit set in an ice-and-salt pack. A few of its terms and proportions need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- A wineglassIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces (1/4 cup). Maraschino here means the clear cherry-pit liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries; any cherry brandy or kirsch stands in.
- The sugar looks excessive, and is deliberateA quart of granulated sugar is roughly 1 lb 12 oz, going into something like 2 1/2 to 3 lb of stoned fruit. Cut it much and the mixture freezes into a solid brick — the sugar is what keeps a still-frozen fruit ice soft enough to spoon. The alcohol works the same way.
- "Place in freezer"The freezer is the metal can of a hand-crank ice cream churn, set in a wooden bucket. "Pack" means surrounding it with alternating layers of crushed ice and rock salt — commonly about three parts ice to one of salt, though period books vary — with the dasher removed and the lid plugged.
- Six hours in the iceThat is the time a packed bucket takes to freeze without churning. A domestic freezer at 0°F does the same job; stir the mixture every 45 minutes for the first three hours if you want it scoopable rather than granular.
- The maceration is not optionalThe hour or more under sugar draws juice from the cherries, and that juice is what freezes into the body of the dish. Rushing it leaves you with sugared fruit in ice rather than a fruit ice.
- Choosing the fruitDark sweet varieties — Bing, Lambert, Black Tartarian — fit the description and were available. Sour Morellos work but will need the full quantity of sugar and then some. Frozen pitted cherries, thawed with their liquid, are an honest substitute.
- YieldTwo quarts of fruit plus the sugar and liqueur makes roughly 2 1/2 quarts of finished ice, perhaps eight to ten generous servings depending on the portion.
Frozen fruit like this belongs to the era when a household with an ice supply could make frozen desserts without a recipe for custard or cream — sugar, ripe fruit and a packed bucket were sufficient. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distinguished between ice creams, water ices, sherbets and "frozen" fruits of exactly this kind, where whole or crushed fruit is frozen in its own sweetened juice. The maraschino is a period marker: the liqueur, distilled from marasca cherries and traditionally associated with the Dalmatian coast, was a familiar bottle in well-stocked American households before Prohibition, and it appears often in fruit desserts of the 1890s and 1900s. Railroads and refrigerated cars were also putting cherries, peaches and citrus in front of cooks who had previously seen them only in season and only locally.