Gelatine Ice
Let one ounce sparkling gelatine stand an hour in a point of cold water. Then add three pints boiling water, one and one-half pounds loaf sugar, one and one-half pint wine, juice of three lemons, rind of two lemons. Stir all these ingredients and freeze before allowing it to congeal. Delicious.
A gelatine-set water ice of the kind churned in a hand-crank freezer, sweet and strongly wined. The proportions are large — roughly five pints of liquid before freezing — and the mixture is deliberately worked before it can set.
- Freeze it before it gelsThe instruction to "freeze before allowing it to congeal" is the whole recipe. Once gelatine sets into a solid block it will not churn smooth; the mixture must go into the freezer still liquid and be worked as it chills so the gelatine sets in fine suspended crystals rather than one rubbery mass.
- "A point of cold water"A printer's slip for a pint. The gelatine is bloomed in a pint of cold water for an hour, then dissolved by the three pints of boiling water that follow.
- Sparkling gelatineA nineteenth-century selling term for clarified, colourless gelatine, sold in sheets or shreds under brand names. One ounce is about 28 g, or roughly four quarter-ounce envelopes of modern powdered gelatine. Spread through five and a half pints of liquid that is a light body rather than a firm set -- enough to thicken the ice, not to jelly it.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar broken from a hard cone and the purest grade then available. Ordinary granulated sugar substitutes directly: a pound and a half is about three and a half cups.
- The wineA pint and a half is not a flavouring but a substantial part of the liquid. Sherry or madeira is the likely intention in a Virginia book of this date. Alcohol depresses the freezing point sharply, so this will never freeze hard — expect a soft, spoonable ice, and expect it to take longer than a plain sorbet.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith and steep it in the hot liquid, then lift it out before freezing. Grated zest left in the mixture will be unpleasant against the smooth texture.
- YieldAbout five and a half pints of base before the lemon juice, or twelve to sixteen small servings. Halve it unless you are feeding a party; a modern ice cream machine will not hold the full quantity in one batch.
- StorageGelatine gives the ice more body than a plain water ice, though the wine here will keep it on the soft side. Let any leftovers soften a little at room temperature before serving, and expect the texture to coarsen after the first day.
Frozen water ices thickened with gelatine were a practical answer to a real problem in a household with no mechanical refrigeration: ice churned by hand in a salt-and-ice freezer melts fast in a warm dining room, and gelatine gives the mixture enough body to hold its shape on the plate for the length of a meal. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia and neighbouring housekeepers, belongs to a period when the hand-crank freezer was well established in comfortable Southern households, and frozen dishes could fill a whole section of a general cookbook rather than being left to a professional confectioner. The heavy pour of wine places this in the older tradition of the punch and the wine jelly, dishes served between courses or at evening parties, where the ice was as much a drink as a dessert. The single-word verdict at the end -- "Delicious" -- is characteristic of the book, which prints its contributors' recipes largely as they were sent in.