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Currant Ice
4 cups water 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 cups currant juice Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I.
A plain water ice: fruit juice, sugar syrup, and nothing else. The recipe leans on an earlier entry for method, so the working details are worth spelling out.
- What "freeze same as" meantThe reference is to a hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, turned steadily until stiff. A modern ice cream maker does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat the mixture thoroughly with a fork or a whisk every 30 minutes until firm.
- Getting the juiceTwo cups of juice takes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of fresh currants. Crush them, warm briefly to loosen the juice, then strain through a jelly bag or several layers of muslin. Do not press hard or the ice will be cloudy. Bottled currant juice works but is often sweetened, so taste before adding the full sugar.
- Dissolve the sugar firstBoil the water and sugar together for a few minutes, cool completely, then stir in the juice. Adding raw sugar to cold juice leaves grit, and heating the juice itself dulls the fresh red flavour.
- Sugar level1 1/2 cups sugar to 6 cups liquid is on the lean side for currants, which are sharply acidic. A mixture that tastes slightly too sweet before freezing will taste correct when frozen; cold blunts sweetness noticeably.
- Which currantAlmost certainly red currants, the standard garden fruit of the period, though the recipe says only "currant juice." Black currants give a much heavier, muskier ice and want a little more sugar; dried "currants" (small raisins) are a different thing entirely and cannot be used.
- TextureWith no cream, egg or stabiliser, this sets hard and icy. Serve it within a few hours of churning, or let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
- YieldAbout 1 3/4 quarts, enough for eight servings as a dessert or a between-courses palate cleanser.
Water ices of this kind were the frugal half of the frozen-dessert repertoire: fruit juice, sugar and water, with no dairy at all. Currants suited the format because they are tart and seedy but yield a clean, brilliantly coloured juice, and nineteenth-century households commonly grew them for jelly. Red currants have since become uncommon in American markets, largely because state and federal restrictions beginning in the 1910s ordered the destruction of currant and gooseberry bushes as alternate hosts of white pine blister rust, a disease of commercial timber. The restrictions were relaxed in later decades, but the fruit never regained its place in the home garden, and recipes like this one now read as a record of a berry that used to be ordinary.