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Cranberry Ice (C sugar Juice lemon Boil)
1 lb. cranberries. 1 qt. water. 3 C sugar Juice 1 lemon Boil cranberries in water, strain, add sugar, and boil until sugar is dissolved. Add lemon juice; when cool, freeze. Very nice to serve at Thanksgiving dinner.
Florence Loveil.
A church-supper ice reduced to its bones: the ingredient list has been partly lost in the typesetting, so the quantities need reconstructing before you start.
- The missing quantitiesOnly 3 cups sugar and the juice of one lemon are actually specified. The cranberries and water are named but never measured, so any amount given here is a reconstruction rather than the original recipe. Proportions of this era for a cranberry ice generally run about 1 quart (roughly 1 lb) berries to 1 quart water for 3 cups sugar.
- "C" means cup3 C is 3 cups, about 600 g granulated sugar.
- Strain while hotCook the berries until they all pop, then push them through a fine sieve or press them in a jelly bag before the pulp cools and stiffens. Cranberries are high in pectin and a cooled mash gives up its juice grudgingly.
- Boil only to dissolveThe instruction is literal: once the sugar is in, keep the heat on just until it is fully dissolved and no grit remains on a spoon. Prolonged boiling concentrates the syrup and the ice will set soft and syrupy rather than firm.
- Lemon goes in off the heatAdding the juice after the boil, as written, preserves its fresh bite; boiled citrus juice tastes flat and slightly cooked.
- FreezingThis was written for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice-cream machine handles it directly; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours for a granita texture. Chill the mixture thoroughly first, since a warm syrup will not churn.
- Yield and servingOn the reconstructed quantities, roughly 1.5 quarts, enough for 8 to 10 small servings. The recipe says only that it is "very nice to serve at Thanksgiving dinner" and does not specify the course.
Cranberry ice occupied an odd middle ground on the American holiday table: sweet enough to read as a dessert, but tart enough to be passed with the roast in place of a relish. The dish depends on a genuinely native ingredient — Vaccinium macrocarpon, harvested commercially from the bogs of Massachusetts, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Hand-crank ice-cream freezers also became cheaper and more widely owned over the later nineteenth century, so frozen dishes moved out of the confectioner's shop and into contributions from women like Florence Loveil, whose name, rather than any measurement of cranberries, is the part of the recipe the compiler took care to preserve.