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Ices, to make Fruit-Water
INGREDIENTS.-To every pint of fruit-juice allow 1 pint of syrup. AVERAGE COST, 10d. per pint.
Select nice ripe fruit; pick off the stalks and put it into a large earthen pan, with a little pounded sugar strewed over; stir it about with a wooden spoon until it is well broken, then rub it through a hairsieve. Make a syrup, without white of egg; let it cool, add the fruit-juice, mix well together, and put the mixture into the 4 ICES, RECIPES FOR. freezing pot. Proceed as directed for Ice Puddings, and when the mixture is equally frozen put it into small glasses or in plates.
ICING, SUGAR.
A water ice in its plainest form: fruit pulp, sugar syrup, and nothing else. The whole result depends on getting the sugar concentration right, since sugar is the only thing standing between a sorbet and a solid block of fruit-flavoured ice.
- The syrup is the hingeThe recipe assumes you already know the confectioner's syrup, and the proportion it gives is by volume: one pint of syrup to one pint of juice. Confectioners' ice syrups were dense -- often something on the order of equal weights of sugar and water boiled together and cooled -- and in the trade the strength was judged with a saccharometer rather than a measuring jug. As written the sugar quantity is genuinely ambiguous; taste the mixed base before freezing, and expect it to seem slightly too sweet cold, because freezing mutes sweetness.
- "Without white of egg"Syrups for cakes and preserves were often clarified by whisking in egg white and skimming off the scum it carried up. Here that step is deliberately omitted, so simply dissolve sugar in water over gentle heat, bring to a boil, and cool completely before adding the juice. Warm syrup will dull the fresh fruit flavour.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, used because it did not react with acid fruit. A fine stainless or nylon sieve does the same job; press with a ladle and scrape the underside, discarding only pips and skin.
- The freezing potA lidded pewter or tin canister sunk in a wooden pail packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, worked with a spaddle and scraped down as it froze. An ice cream churn gives the same result with less effort. Failing that, freeze in a shallow metal tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Fruit choice and acidityRaspberries, strawberries, red currants and apricots are among the fruits commonly used for water ices. Very ripe fruit rubbed raw through a sieve, as here, keeps its perfume but can taste flat; a squeeze of lemon juice sharpens it without altering the method.
- Yield and servingA pint of juice with a pint of syrup gives roughly a quart of finished ice, enough for eight to ten small glasses. Serve it soon after churning: with no cream, egg or stabiliser it hardens quickly and turns grainy after a day or two in a domestic freezer.
- The stray linesThe fragments about iced-pudding moulds, sugar icing and decorations for iced cakes are running heads and catchwords from the neighbouring columns of the original page, not part of this recipe.
Water ices reached English kitchens through Italian and French confectioners, who had been selling sorbetti and eaux glacées in London and Paris from the eighteenth century onward, and they remained the confectioner's branch of cookery rather than the cook's well into the nineteenth. What changed by Mrs Beeton's day was supply: the natural ice trade, shipping lake ice from Norway and North America and storing it in ice wells and commercial ice houses, put crushed ice within reach of an ordinary town household for the first time. That is why a book aimed at the middle-class mistress could carry a page of ices at all, and why the instructions still assume the pail-and-salt freezing pot rather than any machine. The costing of tenpence a pint is a reminder of the other half of the equation, sugar, which the duty reductions of the mid-century had already begun to make cheaper.