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Cranberry Frappé
1 teaspoon gelatine 1 pint cold water 1 pint cranberries 1¼ cups sugar Juice of 1 lemon 1/4 cup boiling water Soak the gelatine in half a cup of the cold water and cook the cranberries in the remainder. When soft press through a sieve; add sugar, lemon and the gelatine, dissolved in the boiling water. Freeze to a mush and serve with roast turkey.
A cranberry ice served slushy rather than solid, meant as a relish course alongside roast turkey rather than as dessert. Two things decide whether it works: the texture you freeze it to, and the very small amount of gelatine that keeps it from setting into a brick.
- Freeze to a mush, not to a blockA frappé is deliberately half-frozen and granular. In a modern freezer, pour the mixture into a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for 2 to 3 hours; in an ice-cream machine, churn only until it holds a spoon trail and stop there.
- A pint of cranberriesMeasured by volume, not weight — about 2 cups, or roughly 8 oz, which is two-thirds of a standard 12 oz bag. A pint of cold water is 2 cups, half of which goes to soften the gelatine.
- The gelatineOne teaspoon of granulated gelatine is a little under half a modern 1/4 oz envelope. It is there only to keep the ice soft and slightly bodied; more will make it rubbery as it thaws on the plate. Soften it in the cold water first, then dissolve in the 1/4 cup boiling water before stirring it into the sieved puree.
- Cooking the fruitCranberries pop and collapse in 8 to 10 minutes of simmering in the remaining 1½ cups water. Press through a sieve while hot; the skins give up their pectin and colour more readily then, and the purée should be smooth, not a jelly.
- Sugar and acid1¼ cups sugar is right for the tartness of cranberries and also for the texture — sugar is what keeps a frappé scoopable. Cutting it back sharply will give you a solid pink ice. Add the lemon juice off the heat so its brightness survives.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 quart, enough for 8 small servings in chilled glasses or on the plate beside the bird. Let it stand a few minutes out of a modern freezer, which will usually hold it harder than the working temperature of the ice-and-salt freezer this was written for.
Frappé comes from the French frapper, to strike or to chill, and in culinary use means iced or chilled; by the early twentieth century American cookbooks were using it for a fruit ice frozen only to a mush. Here it is instructed to be served with roast turkey, which reflects a habit of the period: an iced fruit course could arrive alongside or between the heavy courses of a holiday dinner, doing the work a cranberry sauce or relish would do now. Cranberries themselves are native to North America and were being farmed commercially on Cape Cod and in New Jersey through the nineteenth century, which is why they turn up so freely in American books of this era. The teaspoon of gelatine is a small technical touch of its day — a hedge against the coarse, icy crystals that formed in a hand-cranked or still-packed freezer.