Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › A Cluster of Berries › Gooseberry Water Ice
Gooseberry Water Ice
Squeeze juice from stewed berries unsweetened, or the very ripe berries, allowing a pound of sugar to each pint. Mix well and freeze.
The juice from the stewed fruit may be used further, for custards and creams as well.
L CHAPTER XIV THE LEMON (Citrus limonum: Rutacee) EMONS are not often enough used as food, drink, or medicine. There is nothing more wholesome in natural foods, more effective in toning the system and purifying the blood (unless for some special reason the acid is directly prohibited; see note on potash in Introduction) than this most positive of citrus fruits. It is a special agent with the liver, acting directly upon it and assisting with the proper action of the bowels, cooling the blood and reaching or preventing a long list of ailments which take their rise in disorders of the liver. It is true that the liver may be made torpid by the nerves, which affect it strongly, so that worry, for instance, will partially paralyse its freedom and cause heavy colds and more serious troubles, but whether from improper physical or mental diet-from whatever cause-a clogged liver can make one as miserable, as discouraged and ill as one can be and live. If too late to remove the cause the condition should be relieved or it goes further, being, without doubt, the cause of suicides from the resulting mental depression, as well as "death from natural causes," through disordering the functions of other vital organs of the body. Vividly picturesque descriptions of the horrors of these various resulting complications may be found in almost any patent medicine circular, for it is upon the liver that the authors of these literary gems place the blame for most of the ills to which flesh is heir.
The public is not so apt to seek or dwell upon written or realised liver-nightmares when lemons are plentifully and judiciously used. Malaria is one of the "simple" and direct results of a rebellious, inactive liver, and one most commonly known. Typhoid, with its more serious, .complicated aspect, comes under this head, yet physicians claim that even these germs can be driven out or actually killed by the plentiful and timely use of lemons. It is, however, not only the juice which is beneficial sometimes, the rind being a helpful accessory, as the method of preparing and using it in Roman malarial districts proves, as does also an old-fashioned remedy for colds. It is claimed that it will entirely prevent or cure scurvy and "in England every foreign-going ship is required by law to take such a supply of lemon juice that every seaman shall have a daily allowance of an ounce after having been ten days at sea "-Wood & Bache. As a cooling drink its refrigerant qualities are proven-especially when used without sugar, which is heating. Even merely as an accessory or flavouring it is extremely refreshing in food or drink and many not commonly known ways of using the lemon are here presented, as well as others more conventional, as of value in that very common and natural desire for variety. (It should be remembered that lemon juice, or any other acid, should never be placed in tin receptacles. Use enamel or porcelain.)
A two-line water ice of the old kind: fruit juice, sugar, and nothing else. The instruction that matters is the sugar ratio, which controls texture as much as sweetness.
- Ignore the medical textThe lemon chapter that follows the recipe is pre-modern medical theory and has no bearing on the water ice. Lemons do not cure typhoid or malaria, and the framing of the liver as the seat of most illness belongs to the patent-medicine era.
- The sugar ratioA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice, close to half sugar by weight. That is deliberate in a water ice: sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the mixture scoopable rather than a solid block. Markedly lower proportions of sugar give a harder, icier result.
- Which gooseberriesThe recipe offers two routes because gooseberries are picked at two stages. Hard green fruit is intensely tart and wants stewing first; fully ripe berries, which run red, purple or amber depending on variety, are softer and sweeter and can be pressed raw. Ripe fruit will need a taste check, as the full pound of sugar may flatten it.
- Getting the juiceCrush and stew the green fruit with a splash of water until it collapses, then press through a fine sieve or jelly bag. Gooseberries are pectin-rich, so juice extracted from cooked fruit will body up slightly as it chills. Avoid tin with this much fruit acid; the book's note at the end of the lemon passage says the same, directing the cook to enamel or porcelain.
- Dissolve before freezing"Mix well" means the sugar must be fully dissolved before the mixture goes into the freezer. Warm a little of the juice to dissolve it, then combine with the rest and chill thoroughly, or undissolved crystals will settle and the ice will freeze unevenly.
- Freezing without a churn"Freeze" here meant a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice-cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- YieldA pint of juice plus the sugar makes roughly a quart of finished ice, or four to six small servings. Serve it soon after churning; with no fat or egg it firms up hard on long storage.
- The leftover pulpThe leftover juice -- The recipe sends the remaining juice from the stewed fruit on to "custards and creams." The sieved pulp is worth keeping too; sweetened and folded through whipped cream it is essentially a gooseberry fool, the traditional English use for the same fruit.
Water ices are the older half of the frozen dessert family, fruit juice and sugar frozen without dairy, and they are often said to have been common in nineteenth-century English and American households long before ice cream became an everyday food. Gooseberries were a natural candidate: they are acidic enough to hold their flavour through freezing, which blunts sweetness and aroma, and they were widely grown in British kitchen gardens, where competitive gooseberry clubs weighed prize berries well into the Victorian period. In the United States their fortunes changed sharply in the early twentieth century, when Ribes species were found to be an alternate host for white pine blister rust and federal and state programmes moved to eradicate cultivated and wild currants and gooseberries; some state restrictions survive, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar to many American cooks today. The recipe's placement immediately before an essay prescribing lemons for the liver is typical of the period's fruit books, which moved between cookery and household medicine on the same page.