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Frozen Raspberries
Mash but do not strain the fruit. Add to this sugar and let stand an hour before freezing.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know how a freezer works and how sweet a fruit ice should be. Both need filling in.
- Sugar proportionThe original gives none. For raspberries, about 1 cup sugar to 1 quart of mashed fruit is a workable starting point; taste before churning, since the mixture should be noticeably sweeter than you want the finished ice, as cold mutes sweetness. Sugar is also what keeps the texture scoopable rather than solid, so cutting it back sharply gives a brick.
- Why the hour mattersStanding an hour lets the sugar dissolve completely in the fruit's own juice. Undissolved sugar means a gritty ice and a mixture that freezes unevenly. Stir once or twice during the hour and check that no grains remain on the bottom.
- "Freezing" in this periodIn a recipe of this kind it almost certainly means a hand-crank freezer: a metal can set in a bucket packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, commonly something like three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked until the paddle stiffens. A modern ice-cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours to make a granita-style ice.
- Seeds are the pointThe instruction not to strain is deliberate. Raspberry seeds give this a rough, jammy body quite unlike a smooth sorbet. If you find them intrusive, pass half the pulp through a sieve and leave the rest whole rather than straining it all.
- A little acid and liquidPure mashed fruit and sugar makes a very dense, stiff ice. A tablespoon or two of lemon juice sharpens the flavor, and a few tablespoons of water or a light sugar syrup loosens the mixture enough to churn properly.
- Yield and servingA quart of berries with sugar gives roughly a pint and a half of finished ice, or four to six small servings. Serve it soon after churning; without dairy or eggs it hardens considerably overnight and will need 15 minutes at room temperature to soften.
Frozen fruit of this kind sits between two older categories: the water ice, made from strained juice and syrup, and the ice made from whole crushed pulp. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print many such recipes, often grouped together, because summer soft fruit arrived all at once and would not keep. Raspberries in particular were a short-season crop, too fragile to travel far. The brevity of the instruction is itself a period marker: the ice-and-salt freezer was ordinary kitchen equipment, and a writer could say "before freezing" with no more explanation than she would give for "before baking."