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Strawberry Ice II
1 quart box strawberries 1 cup sugar 1 cup water Lemon juice Make Same as Raspberry Ice II.
A plain water ice: fruit, sugar syrup and a squeeze of lemon, frozen. The proportions are the whole recipe, so the two things worth attending to are the sugar ratio and the freezing method.
- A quart box of strawberriesThe berry box of the period held a dry quart, on the order of 1¼ to 1½ lb of whole berries, or something like 3 to 4 cups hulled. Weigh rather than measure if you can.
- The referenced methodRaspberry Ice II supplies the procedure, which is not reproduced here. The usual water-ice method of the period is to boil sugar and water into a light syrup, cool it, crush and sieve the fruit, combine, sharpen with lemon and freeze. Adding fruit to hot syrup tends to dull both colour and flavour.
- Lemon juice, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. One to two tablespoons for this volume is the usual range; it is there to lift the flavour and offset the sugar, not to be tasted as lemon.
- Sugar is structuralOne cup of sugar to one cup of water plus the fruit's own juice is a large part of what keeps the ice scrapeable rather than solid. Cut the sugar much and the result will freeze noticeably harder.
- SeedsStrawberry seeds are small, and the ice is perfectly edible with them left in, but pressing the crushed fruit through a fine sieve gives a noticeably smoother result. Push the pulp through, not just the juice.
- FreezingA recipe of this date would have been frozen in a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice-cream machine does the same work; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished ice, serving four to six. It is best within a day or two, as water ices coarsen in the freezer.
Water ices — fruit, sugar and water, with no dairy — were the older and cheaper branch of frozen desserts, and American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print them in long runs, one per fruit, each after the first reduced to a list of proportions and a cross-reference. That shorthand is a sign of how routine ice-making had become once the insulated, hand-cranked freezer and reliable delivered ice reached ordinary kitchens; a dish that had once required an icehouse became a summer afternoon's work. Strawberries, the first substantial fruit of the season in most of the country and cheap in glut, were an obvious candidate, and the lemon juice here does what lemon does in nearly all such recipes: restores the acidity that freezing mutes.