Currant Ice
Boil two cups of water with two cups of granulated sugar until it strings, and cool. Into this put one quart of currants, stemmed and strained, but retaining the skins, and the juice of two oranges. Freeze very slowly. In fact, it is much better to pack this in the freezer and allow to stand a full hour before turning the dasher. To the less acid fruits, add lemon and orange in equal parts.
A water ice built on a cooked sugar syrup, from the era of the hand-crank freezer. Two details carry the whole recipe: how far the syrup is boiled, and how slowly the mixture is frozen.
- "Until it strings"This is the thread stage, roughly 230-234F on a candy thermometer, when a drop pulled between finger and spoon forms a short thread. Boil much past it and the ice will be oversweet and slow to set firm; stop short and it will freeze coarse and icy.
- Straining but keeping the skinsThe instruction implies the currants are crushed and pressed through a sieve or food mill so the seeds are left behind while the pulp and skin go through. A food mill is the closer match; a blender will break up the seeds. A quart of currants is somewhere around a pound and a quarter and should yield roughly 2 cups of pulp.
- The freezer and the dasherThe vessel is a hand-crank churn: an inner canister set in a bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, with a paddle (the dasher) turned by hand. Packing it and letting it stand an hour before cranking chills the base right through, so the churn produces fine crystals rather than a slush with a frozen rim.
- Doing it with modern equipmentChill the base to refrigerator temperature or colder, then churn in an ice cream machine. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes until set. Either way the base must be thoroughly cold going in, which is the point of the original hour.
- Finding currantsRed currants are seasonal and scarce in North America, where cultivation was widely banned in the twentieth century as a host for white pine blister rust; some states still restrict it. Frozen currants work perfectly here, and the recipe's last line covers substitutes: with a milder fruit, use equal parts lemon and orange juice instead of orange alone.
- Sweetness and textureTwo cups of sugar to two cups of water gives a decidedly sweet base against tart fruit. If your currants are very ripe, hold back some syrup and taste the base cold, since chilling dulls perceived sweetness.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a dessert ice or twelve as a course between richer dishes.
Rufus Estes published Good Things to Eat in 1911, after years cooking in Chicago restaurants and on Pullman private railcars; he was born enslaved in Tennessee, and his book is often described as the first cookbook published by an African American professional chef, though the claim is contested — Malinda Russell (1866) and Abby Fisher (1881) both precede it, and the "professional chef" qualifier carries much of the weight. Water ices like this one sat squarely in the fine-dining repertoire he worked in, served either as dessert or as a palate-cleansing course partway through a long dinner, and their quality depended entirely on the cook's judgment with a sugar syrup and a salted ice bath. Red currants were then a common kitchen-garden fruit in the northern states and a standard source of clean acidity for jellies and ices, and Estes adds a note on what to do with blander fruit instead.