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Frozen Cherries
2 quarts pie cherries 1 quart water 2 pounds sugar Wash and stone the cherries; cover them with the sugar and let stand one hour. Add the water and freeze.
A plain water ice: fruit, sugar syrup, and nothing else. The proportions are doing all the work, so measure rather than eyeball.
- "Pie cherries" means sour cherriesMontmorency or another tart red variety, not sweet Bings. Sweet cherries in this quantity of sugar produce something cloying and flat; if that is all you can get, cut the sugar sharply and add lemon juice.
- Quantities in plain termsTwo quarts of cherries is roughly 4 lb before stoning, and perhaps 3 to 3 1/2 lb once stoned. Two pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups. The finished mixture comes to something over 3 quarts, enough for a dozen or so servings.
- Why the sugar goes on firstThe hour of maceration draws juice out of the fruit by osmosis and dissolves much of the sugar without heat. Do not shorten it, and scrape in every drop of the syrup that collects.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe instruction most likely assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, in the region of three parts ice to one of salt. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; the mixture should be refrigerator-cold before it goes in.
- Without a machinePour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours. You will get a granita rather than a smooth ice.
- Texture depends on the sugarThat much sugar is not merely for sweetness; it depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice scoopable. Cutting it by a third gives a noticeably harder, less scoopable ice.
- Whole or crushedThe recipe leaves the cherries whole, which freeze into hard nuggets. Crushing or briefly pulsing half the fruit gives better colour and a more even texture, and is a small departure the original would tolerate.
- ServingLet it stand at room temperature five to ten minutes before scooping. A water ice sets much harder than a custard-based one.
Frozen desserts of this kind were divided in period cookbooks into ice creams, which contained dairy, and ices or water ices, which were fruit, sugar and water alone; this cherry ice belongs squarely to the second group. Before mechanical refrigeration, these depended on an ice-and-salt freezer and on a supply of ice cut in winter and stored in sawdust, which is why the frozen chapter of a book like this reads as a summer chapter and leans on whatever fruit was in glut. Sour cherries ripen in a short window in early summer and were the standard American pie cherry, sharp enough that a full two pounds of sugar to the batch reads as balance rather than excess.