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Strawberry Gelee
4 cups crushed strawberries or strawberry juice 2 1/2 to 3 cups sugar 1 quart water 2/3 box vegetable gelatine 1 cup lemon juice Crush the strawberries, and add the sugar, lemon juice and one pint of water. Soak the vegetable gelatine in warm water for twenty minutes or more. Drain. Cook in one pint of boiling water five to ten minutes or until perfectly clear. Strain and add to the crushed berries. Turn into a freezer, and stir about five minutes; then freeze.
If preferred, the vegetable gelatine may be omitted. In that case, add a quart of water to the crushed berries instead of one pint. Other fruits may be used in place of the strawberries.
Despite the name, this is a frozen fruit ice rather than a moulded jelly — the gelatine here is a body-builder that keeps the texture smooth in a hand-crank freezer. Two things need translating: the "vegetable gelatine" and the vague box measure.
- Vegetable gelatine means agarIn books of this period "vegetable gelatine" is agar-agar, sold in boxes of dried strips or flakes, and used by vegetarians and observant cooks in place of calf's-foot or bone gelatin. Powdered agar from an Asian grocer works, but it is far more concentrated than the loose strips the recipe assumes.
- "2/3 box" is unusable as writtenBoxes were not standardised and the weight is not recoverable. For this quantity of mixture (well over 2 quarts once the sugar is dissolved), roughly 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of agar powder, or about 1/3 to 1/2 oz of strips, should give the light body intended - start low, since too much agar tends to make the ice granular and brittle rather than smooth.
- Agar must be fully dissolvedThis is the hinge. Agar swells and softens in water, as the twenty-minute soak here does, but it does not dissolve until it is boiled. The five to ten minutes "until perfectly clear" is the real test; any undissolved specks can show up as gritty threads in the frozen dessert.
- Add the agar syrup while hotAgar sets near 100F, well above room temperature, so the hot solution has to go into the sweetened fruit and be stirred through at once. If it gels in the jug it will not redissolve without boiling again.
- "Turn into a freezer"A crank ice-cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first, then churn until it holds a soft-scoop texture. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita-like result.
- The lemon is not a misprintA full cup of lemon juice against 4 cups of fruit reads as a lot, but sugar at this level needs sharp acid to stay palatable. Taste before freezing; frozen mixtures read as noticeably less sweet and less sour than they do warm.
- Sugar range matters for textureUse the higher end, near 3 cups, with tart or underripe berries and the lower end with very ripe fruit. Cutting the sugar much below 2 1/2 cups will give a hard, icy block rather than an ice.
- YieldThe fruit, water and lemon juice alone come to about 2 1/4 quarts before the sugar is counted, so expect nearer 2 1/2 to 3 quarts.
Books of the meatless-cookery genre, established in America through the vegetarian and Battle Creek publishing of the 1890s and 1900s, had to solve the gelatin problem: ordinary gelatin is rendered from animal bone, hide and connective tissue, and so was ruled out along with the meat. Agar — the boiled extract of red seaweeds, long used in Japan and China and by then a standard laboratory and confectionery material in the West — was the answer, sold in American groceries under the tidy euphemism "vegetable gelatine." Here the agar seems to be doing the work of mouthfeel rather than shape, the work that egg yolk or cream does in richer ices. The closing lines, offering to leave the gelatine out entirely and to swap in "other fruits," are typical of the period's household writing, where a single formula was expected to stretch across whatever the season and the pantry allowed.