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Raspberry Ice II
1 quart raspberries 1 cup sugar 1 cup water Lemon juice Sprinkle raspberries with sugar, cover, and let stand two hours. Mash, squeeze through cheese-cloth, add water and lemon juice to taste, then freeze. Raspberry ice prepared in this way retains the natural color of the fruit. Strawberry Ice I 4 cups water 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 cups strawberry juice 1 tablespoon lemon juice Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I.
A no-cook fruit ice that relies on maceration rather than a boiled syrup, which is why it keeps its raw-fruit colour and flavour.
- The hinge: don't heat itThe whole point of this version is that the fruit is never cooked. Sugar draws the juice out over two hours; heat would dull the bright red to a brownish tone and flatten the perfume.
- YieldA quart of raspberries yields somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice, so the finished mixture is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups -- three or four small servings, or more as a palate course.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe original assumes a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, which churns constantly. In an electric machine, churn 20-25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours to get a granita texture.
- Sugar is structuralOne cup of sugar to a quart of berries is on the lean side by modern practice, and low-sugar ices freeze hard as a brick. Do not reduce it; if the mixture sets too solid, add a tablespoon of corn syrup or a spoon of vodka before churning.
- Lemon juice "to taste"Start with 1 tablespoon and taste the unfrozen mixture, which should seem slightly too tart and slightly too sweet -- freezing mutes both.
- StrainingCheesecloth was the household tool; a fine nylon sieve works better and loses less. Press firmly but do not force the pulp through, or the ice turns cloudy and grainy.
- Frozen fruitFrozen raspberries work well here and often give more juice than fresh, since the cell walls have already ruptured. Thaw them in the sugar rather than beforehand so nothing is lost.
- ServingServe straight from the churn if possible. A fruit ice with no egg, cream or stabiliser develops ice crystals within a day or two in a home freezer.
Water ices of this kind were the plain end of a large family of frozen desserts common in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century into the 1920s -- sherbets, sorbets, frappes churned only to a mush, and ices that were nothing but fruit juice, sugar and water. The spread of commercial ice harvesting and delivery is generally credited with making a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt a realistic piece of household equipment. Cookbooks of the period often give more than one version of the same flavour, as here, one built on a cooked syrup and one on a raw maceration. The note about retaining the natural colour of the fruit is the selling point of the second method, and a fair one; the difference between a cooked and an uncooked raspberry ice is easy to see.