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Frozen Strawberries
Stem two quarts of ripe strawberries, put in a bowl with the juice of two lemons and a pound of sugar; let stand one hour; mash the berries, pour over a pint of water, stir until the sugar dissolves, turn into a freezer and freeze.
A water ice rather than an ice cream — no dairy at all, just fruit, sugar, lemon and water. The proportions are sound, but the equipment assumed is a hand-crank freezer packed in ice and rock salt.
- The freezer"Turn into a freezer and freeze" means a churn set in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt, cranked until stiff. Any modern ice cream machine does the same work; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of berries is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb whole, about 8 cups once stemmed. A pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; a pint of water is 2 cups; two lemons give roughly 1/4 cup juice.
- Do not cut the sugarThe sugar looks heavy but it is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than a solid block. Reducing it much below a pound for this volume of fruit and water gives something closer to a fruit-flavoured ice cube.
- The standing hour mattersAn hour with sugar and lemon macerates the berries and draws out juice, which is why the mashing afterwards is easy and the colour is deep. Skipping it leaves you crushing dry fruit into dry sugar.
- Chill before churningThe base will be at room temperature after an hour of standing. Refrigerate it until cold, ideally an hour or two, or a machine will struggle to freeze it and the texture will be coarse.
- SeedsThe original leaves them in, as mashed berries would. Pressing the mashed fruit through a fine sieve before adding the water gives a smoother ice, at the cost of some pulp.
- YieldRoughly 2 quarts finished, serving eight to ten. It is best within a day or two — a water ice with no dairy or egg hardens and grows icy in the freezer over time.
Frozen desserts in American household books of this period split into two families: cream ices, made rich with custard or cream, and water ices like this one, which are nothing but fruit, sugar and water frozen while stirred. The water ice was the cheaper and the more seasonal of the two, and strawberries — a crop that arrived all at once in June and would not keep — were an obvious candidate. What made such recipes possible in an ordinary kitchen was the crank freezer set in ice and rock salt, a nineteenth-century device widespread in homes by the time this book was compiled, together with a commercial ice trade that delivered blocks to the door. The instruction "turn into a freezer and freeze" needed no further explanation to a reader of the day; the machine, the ice and the salt were assumed to be at hand.