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Currant Ice
2 cups sugar 1 pint water 3 cups currant juice Whites of 2 eggs 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Boil the sugar and water for fifteen minutes; when cool add the currant juice; strain and freeze. When nearly frozen add the juice; strain and freeze. When nearly frozen add the whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth with the powdered sugar.
A red-currant water ice of the old school, finished with an uncooked meringue. The finishing step is the problem: the beaten whites go into a barely-frozen ice and are never heated at any point, so nothing in the recipe brings the egg to a safe temperature.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are whipped with powdered sugar and folded into a cold ice, then held frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply suspends it, and the ice is eaten cold. This is the reason the recipe cannot be made as printed, and it is the whole of the reason. If you want a currant ice, use a current recipe.
- The acid does not make it safeCurrant juice is sharply acidic, and cooks sometimes assume that acidity plus sugar plus cold amounts to a safeguard. It does not. The whites are added last, into a mixture already chilled and diluted, with no holding time at any temperature that would reduce a pathogen load.
- A printer's slipA repeated line -- The clause "when nearly frozen add the juice; strain and freeze" appears twice in the text as we have it, apparently a duplication in setting or transcription. The intended sequence is boil syrup, cool, add juice, strain, freeze, then fold in the whites.
- What the syrup was forTwo cups of sugar boiled fifteen minutes with a pint of water reduces to a heavy syrup. In a hand-cranked ice this concentration kept the mixture from freezing into a solid block; it is doing the work that invert sugar or glucose does in modern sorbet formulas.
- Currant means red currantThree cups of juice is a great deal of fruit -- several pounds of red currants, crushed and strained. Nineteenth-century kitchens had them from the garden in July. Dried Zante currants, which share the name, are irrelevant here.
- "Freeze" means a churnFreezing here means a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and salt, the standard equipment of the period. "Nearly frozen" is the slushy stage at which the paddle starts to labour -- the point at which a meringue could still be worked in.
Water ices flavoured with fruit juice were among the plainest and cheapest of the frozen desserts, requiring no cream and no custard, and they were a fixture of the summer pages of American cookbooks in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Red currants were a staple of the northern kitchen garden -- grown chiefly for jelly, and abundant enough that the surplus juice went into ices, shrubs and cordials. The beaten whites folded in at the end lighten the texture and keep the ice from setting hard and grainy, a trick that did real work before stabilisers and continuous freezers.