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Grape Fruit Ice
Make the same as lemon or orange-ice; a rather strong, sweet, "grape-fruitade" with the pomelos alone or adding to each quart the juice of one lemon or two oranges (or both).
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have a lemon or orange water ice in hand and simply swaps the fruit. The proportions are left to the cook, so the useful work here is setting the sugar and the freezing method.
- Pomelo means grapefruit hereIn American books of this period "pomelo" was a common trade and horticultural name for the grapefruit, not the large thick-skinned pomelo (Citrus maxima) sold under that name today. Use ordinary grapefruit.
- A working baseFor a water ice of this type, roughly 1 quart of liquid to 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, dissolved as a syrup and cooled before freezing. Grapefruit needs the upper end: naringin makes it read bitter, and cold flattens sweetness further, so taste the base at refrigerator temperature, not warm.
- "Rather strong" is the instruction that mattersFreezing mutes both aroma and sugar. The base should taste slightly too sweet and too assertive in the glass; a mixture that tastes balanced at room temperature will freeze out thin and watery.
- StrainGrapefruit juice carries membrane and pulp fragments that go stringy and unpleasant when frozen. Strain through a fine sieve, and avoid squeezing the pith, which pushes bitterness into the juice.
- The lemon or orange additionOne lemon or two oranges per quart is not filler. Lemon sharpens a grapefruit that has gone flabby; orange rounds a grapefruit that is aggressively bitter. Choose based on the fruit you have rather than adding both by default.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe method is not given here; a book of this date would expect a pail freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice cream machine works directly. Failing that, still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- Texture and holdingSugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable; too little and it sets to a solid block. If it freezes rock hard, let it stand 10 minutes before serving. Best eaten the day it is made.
- YieldA quart of base serves six as a small course between dishes, or four as a dessert.
Water ices flavored with citrus were the standard palate-cleansing course in late nineteenth-century American dining, served between roast and game, and cookbooks of the era tended to give one full method for lemon ice and then dispose of every other fruit in a sentence, exactly as here. What makes this entry a period marker is the word "pomelo": grapefruit was still a novelty crop in the United States when this was written, and the trade had not settled on a name for it. The fruit is generally traced to Barbados, where it appears to have arisen as a cross between the true pomelo and the sweet orange, and it reached Florida in the nineteenth century; Count Odet Philippe is traditionally credited with planting early trees near Tampa Bay. Commercial shipping from Florida groves made the fruit familiar enough by the turn of the century for a compiler to assume readers could get "pomelos" by the quart.