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Frozen Desserts: Juice
Pineapple Water Ice. 2 large yellow pineapples, 3 cupfuls sugar, 4 cupfuls water, Juice 2 lemons.
Pare the pineapples, grate them, and add the juice of the lemons. Boil the sugar and water together five minutes. When cold, add the pineapple, strain through a fine sieve, and freeze.
Raspberry Water Ice. 1 quart red raspberries, 4 cupfuls water, Juice 2 lemons, 2 cupfuls sugar.
Add the sugar and lemon juice to the berries, stir, and stand an hour; then mash, add the water, strain through a cloth, and freeze.
Strawberry Water Ice. 1 quart strawberries, 2 cupfuls sugar, 4 cupfuls water, Juice 2 lemons.
Add the sugar and lemon juice to the strawberries, mash them, and stand an hour; add the water, strain through a cloth, and freeze.
Grape Water Ice. 3 pounds Concord grapes, 4 cupfuls water, 2 cupfuls sugar.
FROZEN DESSERTS Boil the sugar and water together five minutes. Pulp the grapes, add the pulps and skins to the sirup; stand to cool. When cold, press through a fine sieve, being careful not to mash the seeds, and freeze.
Ginger Water Ice. 6 ounces preserved ginger, 1 quart lemon water ice.
Pound 4 ounces ginger to a paste.
Five water ices built on the same frame: a fruit purée, sugar, water and usually lemon, strained and churned. The proportions are sound; only the equipment and one or two of the fruits need comment.
- The hinge: sugar is structureIn a water ice the sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable rather than a solid block, so resist the urge to cut it. These recipes run roughly 2-3 cups sugar to 4 cups water plus fruit, which lands near the 20-25 percent sugar that sorbet still uses. Cut the sugar by half and you get a fruit-flavoured brick.
- Freezing without a churn"Freeze" here means a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked 20-25 minutes. A modern ice cream machine does the same job. Failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a coarser granita texture.
- Straining through a clothA jelly bag or double layer of butter muslin, not cheesecloth from the supermarket, which is too open. Let the berry mixtures drip rather than squeezing hard if you want a clear ice; press if you prefer body and colour over clarity.
- PineappleTwo large pineapples grated yields roughly 4-5 cups of pulp and juice. Pare deeply and cut out the fibrous core before grating, and use fresh fruit; canned pineapple has been heated and tastes of the can in something this plain. Grating on a box grater is messy but does extract more juice than chopping.
- Concord grapes and the seed warningThe instruction not to mash the seeds is the important one. Concord seeds release harsh tannin and a bitter, green note that will not cook out. Press the pulp through a sieve with a flexible spatula rather than a stiff pestle. Concords also throw tartrate crystals as they chill; straining after cooling, as directed, takes care of it.
- Ginger water ice, cut off mid-sentenceThe page breaks after "Pound 4 ounces ginger to a paste." What followed is not on the page; comparable recipes of the period work the paste into the quart of lemon water ice before freezing and stir in the remaining 2 ounces of preserved ginger, finely diced, sometimes with a little of its syrup. Preserved ginger here means stem ginger in heavy syrup, not crystallised and not dried.
- Macerating an hourFor the berry ices, the hour's standing with sugar and lemon draws juice out and dissolves the sugar cold, so no cooking is needed. Do it at room temperature, not in the refrigerator, and stir once or twice.
- Yield and servingVolumes differ: the berry ices come out around 1.75 quarts, the pineapple closer to two and a half, so eight or more small glasses. Water ices freeze harder than dairy ice cream; move the container to the refrigerator for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.
Water ices are the older branch of the frozen dessert family, well established in European kitchens before custard-based ice creams became common, and the list of flavours here seems to track what an American household could plausibly get, though the page carries no date to fix the period precisely. Pineapple arrived by fast steamer and rail and was still enough of an event to warrant two whole fruits; Concord grapes, raised in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, were the default American grape; raspberries and strawberries would generally have been local and seasonal. The preserved ginger came from China in stoneware jars and was one of the few genuinely exotic sweets in the pantry, which is why a spoonful of it was thought worth folding into plain lemon ice. That all five recipes end with the single word "freeze" says something about the period: the ice-and-salt freezer was ordinary equipment, and the ice itself was delivered.