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Raspberry Ice Cream
INGREDIENTS for 1 quart.-1 lemon, 1 lb. pot of jam, pint of cream, & pint of milk, a few drops of cochineal. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 10d.
Strain the lemon-juice over the jam, colour with the cochineal, add the milk and cream, and freeze as other ices.
TIME.-25 minutes to freeze.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A no-cook, no-custard ice cream: the whole flavour and all the sugar come from a pot of raspberry jam. It works, but the sweetness and texture depend entirely on the jam you choose.
- QuantitiesThe recipe makes 1 quart (about 1.1 litres in imperial measure). The dairy measures have lost their fractions in this printing; one workable balance for a pound of jam is about 1 pint (570 ml) cream to 1/2 pint (285 ml) milk, but that is a guess at the missing fractions rather than a reading of the text.
- "1 lb. pot of jam"A pound pot is close to today's 450 g jar. Old-style jam was boiled to a high sugar content, so modern reduced-sugar or "extra fruit" preserves, having less sugar to depress the freezing point, will give a harder, icier result.
- CochinealCochineal is carmine, the red dye from the scale insect Dactylopius coccus, sold in Mrs Beeton's day as drops of liquid colouring. It is still a legal food colour, listed as carmine or E120, but it is not vegetarian; a drop of beetroot or a modern red colouring serves the same cosmetic purpose.
- Strain the jam too, if you likeThe lemon juice is strained over the jam, but the jam itself is not. Raspberry seeds are noticeable in a frozen mixture, so push the jam through a sieve first for a smooth ice.
- The lemon is structuralOne lemon's juice in a quart of very sweet dairy is not garnish. It cuts the sugar and keeps the raspberry tasting like fruit rather than syrup, so do not reduce it.
- "Freeze as other ices"This assumes a pail freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, turned and scraped by hand. In a domestic ice-cream machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20-30 minutes; the stated 25 minutes is about right.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal tray and beat it thoroughly every 30-40 minutes until set, three or four times. Unbeaten, the high sugar content will still give a scoopable result, but a coarse and crystalline one.
- ServingA quart serves six to eight. It softens fast because of the sugar, so scoop straight from the freezer.
Store-cupboard ices like this one belong to the last decades of the nineteenth century, when commercially made jam had become cheap and ubiquitous in British households and the ice trade had put block ice within reach of ordinary kitchens. Raspberry ices made with fresh fruit depended on the season; this version carries the note "seasonable at any time." Cochineal appears because jam that has been boiled and stored loses its brightness, and Victorian confectioners judged an ice as much by colour as by flavour. The costing of 1s. 10d. for a quart puts it firmly in the reach of a middle-class family with a servant to turn the freezer handle.