Citron Ice
Slice citron, pour on it a rich, hot lemonade, and freeze.--Mrs. E.I.
Three clauses and no quantities, which is typical of the ice recipes in this book — the compiler assumed you already knew how to work a freezer and how sweet a syrup had to be. The two things worth settling are what "citron" means and how much sugar the lemonade needs.
- Which citronIn a Virginia book of this date "citron" most often means candied citron peel (Citrus medica), sold in slabs for cakes and puddings, though citron melon — the hard white preserving melon — was also common in Southern kitchens. Candied peel gives the perfumed, faintly bitter result the recipe seems to want; melon would need to be cooked in syrup first. The original does not say, and there is no way to settle it from the text.
- "A rich lemonade"Rich here means heavily sweetened, not merely strong. For an ice, work to roughly 1 cup sugar and 3/4 cup lemon juice per quart of water; less sugar and the mixture freezes into a solid block rather than a scrapeable ice.
- Why the lemonade is hotHeat dissolves the sugar and draws flavour and oils out of the citron. Pour it over the sliced citron, let it stand until cool, then strain — or leave a little of the finely chopped peel in for texture — and chill thoroughly before freezing.
- Chill before churningA warm mixture put into a machine will melt its own ice and churn badly. Refrigerate to 40F or below first.
- FreezingIn an ice-cream machine, churn 20 to 30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth sorbet.
- YieldA quart of lemonade base makes roughly a quart of finished ice, or four to six small servings. Sugar-heavy ices do not hold well; serve within a day or two.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathers contributions from named and initialled housekeepers across the state, and its ices seem to assume access to a well-stocked ice house — cut winter ice packed in straw and sawdust, still the standard cooling technology in rural Virginia when the book appeared. Fruit ices of this kind, sweetened acid water frozen with a paddle in a pail of ice and salt, were the plainest end of a tradition that reached Anglo-American tables from French and Italian confectionery in the eighteenth century, and Jefferson's Monticello notes are often cited as an early Virginia instance. Citron itself was an imported luxury, kept candied in the storeroom for cakes and mincemeat; turning a little of it into a summer ice is the kind of frugal improvisation these single-line contributions preserve better than any formal cookbook.