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Cranberry Ice (Pt cranberries C water qt)
1 pt. cranberries 1/2 C water 1 qt. boiling water 2 T (level) flour 2 oranges 2 lemons 1 egg white 1 C heavy cream Small can crushed pineapple Run Boil cranberries and 1/2 C water until berries are tender. Run through colander and add 1 C sugar. Heat and stir until sugar is dissolved. Pour boiling water over the 2 C sugar and flour which have been well mixed. Cool and add juice of oranges and lemons, pineapple, egg white (beaten stiff), cranberry mixture and cream. Mix well. Freeze and pack. This is delicious served with fowl. Mrs. P. G. Osborn. 112
A hand-crank freezer recipe from a church-supper collection, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how ices worked. Two things need attention before you start: the egg white is never cooked, and the flour syrup is barely cooked.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white goes into a cooled mixture and is never heated, so use pasteurized egg white (about 2 tablespoons from a carton) if you are serving children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant. It is there for lightness, not flavor, and the recipe holds together without it.
- Cook the flour syrupA quart of boiling water poured over flour and sugar will not cook out the raw-flour taste or let the starch swell properly. Whisk the sugar-flour mixture with the boiling water in a saucepan and simmer 2 to 3 minutes until it just thickens and clears, then cool.
- Measures1 pint of whole cranberries is about 2 cups, roughly two-thirds of a standard 12-ounce bag. The sugar totals 3 cups: 1 cup into the hot cranberry pulp, 2 cups into the flour syrup. "Small can crushed pineapple" is unspecified; period small cans ran around 8 to 9 ounces, and it is easiest to use it undrained.
- Run through a colanderThis means pressing the cooked berries through to leave skins behind. A food mill or a fine sieve does it faster; a blender will not, since it purees the skins back in.
- The stray "Run"The word appears twice, once orphaned before "Boil." It looks like a slip in the text rather than an instruction.
- Freezing without a crank freezerAn ice cream machine handles this directly. Still-freezing in a shallow pan works too, but beat it hard with a fork every 30 minutes for the first 2 hours or the pineapple and cream will separate into layers of icy grain.
- "Pack"In 1900s practice this meant burying the packed canister in ice and salt to ripen and harden for an hour or two. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job; give it 2 hours before serving.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the volumes suggest something in the region of 2 to 3 quarts. With cream in it this is closer to a sherbet than an ice; served in a small glass alongside roast fowl, as the recipe suggests, a scant half cup per person is plenty.
Serving a tart frozen ice partway through a heavy meal was a familiar practice in American dining from the 1880s through the 1920s, when the menu of a formal dinner might list a "Roman punch" or fruit ice between courses to reset the palate. Cranberry, already fixed in the national imagination as the accompaniment to turkey, made an obvious choice for a holiday table, and the note "delicious served with fowl" suggests this was not thought of as a dessert at all. The flour-thickened syrup is a frugal older trick for giving body to an ice without eggs or much cream, while the crushed pineapple in a small can points to the canned pineapple that had become cheap and widely available in the early twentieth century. Church cookbooks like this one, sold to raise money and credited recipe by recipe to the women of the congregation, are among the best records of what people in a particular town actually cooked.