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Raspberry Ice
Make as for simple Introductory Recipe for Fruit Ices or by mixing one quart red raspberries with one pound of sugar, the juice of an orange and lemon, letting stand an hour, straining, adding a quart of water and freezing.
A late-Victorian water ice: fruit, sugar, citrus, water, and nothing else. The proportions are sound, but the freezing method the book assumes is a hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt.
- What the quantities come toA quart of red raspberries is roughly 1 1/4 lb, or about 4 cups. A pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. With the added quart of water this gives a syrup somewhere around 20 to 25 percent sugar, which is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than solid.
- The maceration is not optionalThe hour of standing lets the sugar draw juice and colour out of the berries. Skip it and you strain away most of the flavour with the pulp.
- StrainingPress the fruit through a fine sieve rather than pouring it through — you want the pulp, not just the free-run juice. Raspberry seeds are hard and unpleasant frozen, so the sieve should be fine enough to hold them all back. Chinois or a doubled square of muslin both work.
- CitrusOne orange and one lemon, juiced, is roughly 1/3 cup orange and 3 tablespoons lemon. The acid sharpens the sugar and keeps the ice from tasting flat.
- FreezingChill the mixture thoroughly before it goes into an ice cream machine, and churn until it holds a soft ridge. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than the smooth ice intended here.
- Serving and yieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or eight small portions. Water ices set harder than custard ices; move it from freezer to refrigerator for 15 minutes before scooping.
- Adjusting sweetnessDo not cut the sugar much below the stated pound. Less sugar means a harder, icier block, not simply a less sweet one.
Fruit ices of this kind — juice, sugar, water, no dairy — were often described as the older and cheaper half of the frozen-dessert repertoire, and cookbooks of the period seem generally to have kept them in a separate chapter from cream ices. The book's structure here is typical: a single "Introductory Recipe for Fruit Ices" laying out the method, with individual fruits treated in a line or two afterward, on the assumption that the cook had already learned to pack a freezer with cracked ice and coarse salt and turn the crank. Domestic ice-making machinery and commercial ice delivery had made this feasible in ordinary middle-class households by the later nineteenth century, and this is often said to be why ices migrated from confectioners' shops into general cookbooks. Raspberries, highly perishable and briefly in season, were an obvious candidate: freezing was one of the few ways to hold their flavour past the few midsummer weeks they were worth eating fresh.