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Pine-apple Water Ice
INGREDI- - ENTS for sufficient ice for 8 persons. lb. of tinned pine, the juice of a small lemon 1 pint of clarified sugar, 1/2 pint of water.
AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Chop the pine thin, bruise it in a mortar, mix it well with the other ingredients, pass it through a sieve, and freeze.
TIME.-25 minutes to freeze.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Pippins, Normandy, Stewed. -INGREDIENTS-1 lb. of Normandy pippins, 1 quart of water, 1/2 teaspoonful of powdered cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoonful of ground ginger, 1 lb. of moist sugar, 1 lemon. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Well wash the pippins, and put them into 1 quart of water with the above proportion of cinnamon and ginger, and let them stand 12 hours; then put these altogether into a stewpan, with the lemon, sliced thinly, and half the moist sugar. Let them boil slowly until the pippins are half done; then add the remainder of the sugar, and simmer until they are quite tender.
Serve on glass dishes for dessert.
TIME.-2 to 3 hours.
SEASONABLE.-Suitable for a winter dish.
INGREDIENTS.
Plaice, Fried.
Plaice, hot lard, or clarified dripping; egg and bread-crumbs. AVERAGE COST, 6d. per lb.
This fish is fried in the same manner as PLOVERS, TO DRESS. them to table with shrimp sauce and plain melted butter.
TIME. About 5 minutes.
SEASONABLE from May to November.
Note.-Plaice may be boiled plain, and served with melted butter. Garnish with parsley and cut lemon.
A simple sorbet of tinned pineapple, lemon and sugar syrup, churned in an ice pail. Two of the quantities have lost their fractions, so treat the proportions as a guide rather than a formula.
- Clarified sugarNot a modern product but a syrup: sugar boiled with water and skimmed until clear, egg white being the usual clarifying agent in Victorian confectionery. A pint of syrup made from roughly equal weights of sugar and water will serve.
- The pineapple quantityThe original reads "lb. of tinned pine" with the fraction dropped. A 1 lb tin of pineapple in syrup, drained, suits a pint of syrup and half a pint of water; taste before freezing and adjust with lemon.
- Tinned pineapple is deliberateFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that does no harm in a water ice, but fresh fruit varies widely in sweetness and acidity. Tinned fruit has been heated and packed in syrup, so it is sweeter and more consistent. If you use fresh, expect a sharper ice.
- Bruise, then sieveThe mortar and the sieve are the hinge of the recipe. Pineapple is fibrous, and unsieved pulp gives a stringy ice; press the purée through a fine sieve and discard what stays behind.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessA water ice with too little sugar freezes to a solid block. If your mixture tastes barely sweet at room temperature it will taste of nothing when frozen and be hard to scoop.
- "25 minutes to freeze"That is churning time in a pail freezer packed with ice and coarse salt. An ice-cream machine takes about the same; if still-freezing in a tray, whisk hard every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours to break up the crystals.
- YieldSufficient for 8 by Victorian dessert standards, which means small glasses. Reckon on 4 to 6 modern portions.
Water ices were the lighter half of the Victorian ice repertoire, served between courses or as a dessert in glasses, and they depended on the ice trade: blocks cut from Norwegian and North American lakes, shipped to London and stored in ice wells, then packed with salt around a metal freezing pot. The tin suggests this is a later recipe. Pineapple, an expensive hothouse curiosity for most of the nineteenth century, became a more everyday flavour once canneries in Singapore began shipping preserved fruit in syrup. The average cost of a shilling for eight portions marks it as a dish an ordinary middle-class household could attempt, provided it could get ice.