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Raspberry and Currant Ice
4 cups water 1 1/3 cups sugar 2/3 cup raspberry juice 1 1/3 cups currant juice Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I.
Creme de Menthe Ice 4 cups water 1 cup sugar 1/3 cup Creme de Menthe cordial Green coloring Make a syrup as for Lemon Ice, add cordial and coloring; strain and freeze.
A water ice in the plain nineteenth-century style: fruit juice, sugar syrup and water, churned until firm. The proportions here are unusually lean on sugar for a currant ice, which matters more than it looks.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessAt 1 1/3 cups sugar to 4 cups water plus 2 cups juice, this freezes hard and grainy in a modern freezer. If you are not using a churn packed with ice and salt, raise the sugar toward 2 cups or expect to let it soften 15 minutes before serving.
- Currant juiceFresh currants, not dried currants (which are grapes); a period recipe calling simply for 'currant juice' would ordinarily mean red currants. Simmer the stemmed fruit briefly with a splash of water, then strain through a jelly bag without pressing; a couple of pounds of fruit should yield the 1 1/3 cups called for. Frozen red currants work as well as fresh.
- Making the syrupBoil the sugar with part of the water for about five minutes to dissolve fully, then cool completely before adding the juices. Heating the juice itself dulls the raspberry aroma.
- Strain and chillRaspberry seeds and currant skins should be strained out, and the mixture should be refrigerator-cold before it goes into the machine. Warm mixtures churn to slush.
- ChurningIn an ice-cream maker, 20 to 30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than the smooth ice intended.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a course between dishes or after a rich dinner.
- Creme de Menthe variantThe alcohol in the cordial lowers the freezing point noticeably, so that mixture stays soft and needs longer churning and a very cold freezer to hold its shape.
Water ices like this one belong to the era when a household with an ice supply and a hand-cranked freezer served a fruit ice as a palate cleanser partway through a long dinner, or as the light end to one. Red currants were a standard kitchen-garden fruit in Britain and the northern United States, valued for their high pectin and sharp acidity; pairing them with raspberry, which ripens at the same time, was a natural economy as well as a good balance, since raspberry alone tends to taste flat and perfumed without the currant's edge. Summer puddings rest on much the same combination. Currants have largely disappeared from American markets, in part because cultivation was restricted for much of the twentieth century as a host of white pine blister rust, which is why a recipe that once assumed them now reads as unfamiliar.