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Frozen Cranberries
4 cups cranberries 2 1/4 cups sugar 1 1/2 cups boiling water Pick over and wash cranberries, add water and sugar, and cook ten minutes, skimming during the cooking. Rub through a sieve, cool, and pour into one-pound baking-powder boxes. Pack in salt and ice, using equal parts, and let stand four hours. If there is not sufficient mixture to fill two boxes, add water to make up the desired quantity. Serve as a substitute for cranberry sauce or jelly.
A cranberry pur et frozen in a salt-and-ice pack rather than churned, so it sets as a firm ice rather than a sorbet. The whole method translates directly to a freezer and a loaf pan.
- Sieve while hotRub the cooked berries through the sieve as soon as they come off the heat. Cranberry pectin sets quickly as it cools, and a cooled mass will not pass through without a fight.
- Baking-powder boxesOne-pound baking-powder tins held roughly two cups each, so the recipe expects about a quart of pur et in two straight-sided cylinders that could be unmolded and sliced. Two small loaf pans, ramekins, or any freezer-safe containers of similar volume do the same job.
- Salt and ice, or a freezerEqual parts crushed ice and coarse salt makes an aggressive brine that can fall to roughly -6F at best, cold enough to freeze the mixture solid in a few hours without stirring. A home freezer at 0F will do much the same in four to six hours; there is no churning to miss.
- Keep water out of the moldIf you do pack in salt and ice, tape or seal the lids. Brine seeping into the puree will ruin it, and it cannot be tasted out.
- Texture to expectFrozen without agitation, this sets hard and slightly icy, meant to be turned out and cut in slices or scraped. Let it sit five to ten minutes at room temperature before unmolding.
- SugarAt 2 1/4 cups sugar to 4 cups berries this is sweeter than most modern cranberry sauce, which is deliberate: sugar keeps the frozen block from setting into a solid brick. Cutting it much reduces the texture as well as the sweetness.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving eight to ten as an accompaniment to roast poultry or pork.
Cranberries were one of the few native North American fruits to hold a permanent place on the nineteenth-century table, cheap in autumn and keeping for weeks in a cold cellar, and cookbooks of the period print sauce, jelly, tart and preserve versions in sequence. Freezing one of them was a small piece of showmanship made possible by the ice trade: by 1900 block ice was widely available in towns, and the same salt-and-ice pack used for ice cream would set anything given a few hours. The reuse of one-pound baking-powder tins as molds is a good marker of the era's kitchen economy - tight-fitting, straight-sided, free once emptied, and exactly the shape for a frozen cylinder that could be sliced into rounds.