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Pomegranate Ice
Cut a dozen ripe pomegranates in half and remove seeds from the rind carefully. In the juice stir till dissolved one pound of sugar. Add gradually a pint of water; strain again and freeze.
A three-sentence water ice from the era of the hand-cranked freezer. The instruction that matters is the one the text only implies: get juice from the arils without crushing the bitter white pith or the membrane, or the sorbet turns astringent.
- Juicing without bitternessSeparate the arils from all rind and membrane, then press them gently — a potato ricer, a nylon sieve, or a few pulses in a blender followed by straining. Do not grind the seeds themselves; the hard inner kernel and any pith carry tannin that reads as bitter once the mixture is cold.
- How much juice a dozen fruit givesTwelve medium pomegranates might give anywhere from about 4 to 6 cups of juice depending on size and ripeness. With a pound of sugar and a pint of water that comes to something like 7 to 9 cups of base — enough for eight to twelve servings.
- A pound of sugarTwo and a quarter cups granulated. At this ratio the base sits somewhere around a quarter sugar by weight, which is roughly what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than solid; cutting the sugar much below a pound risks a harder, icier result.
- "Strain again"The word "again" suggests the juice had already been strained once when pressed, though the recipe never says so. Pass the finished, sweetened liquid through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth to catch sediment and any stray aril fragments.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerIn this period the base went into a pail packed with ice and coarse salt and was churned by hand. In an ice-cream machine, chill the base thoroughly first and churn 20 to 30 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Dissolving the sugarCold pomegranate juice takes sugar slowly. Warm a cup of the juice to dissolve the sugar, then stir it back into the rest and chill before freezing — dissolving cold and by hand is where grittiness comes from.
- A splash of acid or saltRipe pomegranates vary widely. Taste the base before freezing; a squeeze of lemon sharpens a flat batch, and a pinch of salt lifts the fruit. Cold mutes sweetness, so the unfrozen mixture should taste slightly too sweet.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar, water, no dairy — were the lighter half of the frozen-dessert repertoire in Anglo-American cookery, served between courses as much as at the end of a meal. Pomegranates reached northern markets as a seasonal luxury, and they show up in books of this kind alongside guava, mango and other fruits a home cook would have met only occasionally. The recipe's brevity is characteristic: it seems to presume a reader who already owns an ice pail and knows how to pack it with salt and ice, so that the only things worth writing down are the proportions.