Home › Cookery › Raspberry Ice
Raspberry Ice
Three quarts juice, one quart water. Sweeten heavily, and after putting in the freezer add the whites of six eggs beaten very light. The same recipe will answer for currant or cherry ice--Mrs. M. C. C.
WATERMELON ICE (beautiful and delicious).
Select a ripe and very red melon. Scrape some of the pulp and use all the water. A few of the seeds interspersed will add greatly to the appearance. Sweeten to the taste and freeze as you would any other ice. If you wish it very light, add the whites of three eggs, thoroughly whipped, to one gallon of the icing just as it begins to congeal. Beat frequently and very hard with a large iron spoon.--Mrs. J. J.
Two fruit ices from the same page, both finished with raw egg white stirred into a mixture that is never heated. That is the reason for the caution above; the rest of the notes explain the vocabulary and proportions, which are worth understanding even though the recipes should not be followed as printed.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenBoth ices depend on uncooked egg whites — six in the raspberry, three per gallon in the watermelon — folded into a cold fruit base that never approaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not destroy the organism; it simply preserves it. Use a current recipe for fruit sorbet or sherbet instead.
- "The freezer"In 1879 this most likely means a pail freezer: an inner metal canister surrounded by cracked ice and coarse salt. "Just as it begins to congeal" describes the moment the mixture thickens against the canister wall, not a setting on a machine.
- The iron spoonThe instruction to beat "frequently and very hard with a large iron spoon" is hand agitation of the freezing mixture. The repeated beating breaks up ice crystals; without it a fruit ice sets into a solid block.
- "Sweeten heavily"No quantity is given because sugar was judged by taste and by the fruit. Three quarts of raspberry juice would take somewhere in the region of two to three pounds of sugar. Sugar also depresses the freezing point, which is why under-sweetened ices freeze hard and grainy.
- ScaleThree quarts of juice plus a quart of water yields a gallon of finished ice — a party quantity, and a reminder that three quarts of raspberry juice implies a very large quantity of berries.
- Watermelon proportionsThe instruction is to use "all the water" — the free juice from the flesh — with only some scraped pulp, so the result is a light red ice rather than a purée. The recipe treats the scattered seeds as decoration: they "add greatly to the appearance."
By the 1870s Southern kitchens with access to an icehouse or a commercial ice wagon could make fruit ices through the summer. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, most identified only by initials — hence "Mrs. M. C. C." and "Mrs. J. J." — and the ice chapter reads as a survey of whatever the garden was producing: raspberry, currant, cherry, watermelon. The egg-white finish belongs to a period habit of using beaten whites as a lightener wherever air was wanted, in cakes, jellies, syllabubs and ices alike; the modern equivalents are Italian meringue and gelatin-stabilised sorbet, both of which get around the raw egg. Watermelon ice is headed in the book itself "beautiful and delicious," and reads as a showpiece.