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Frozen Strawberries
1 quart strawberries 1 pound sugar Juice of 1 lemon 1 quart water Wash, drain and mash the berries; cover them with the lemon and sugar and let stand for one hour. Add the water; stir until the sugar is dissolved, and freeze.
A strawberry water ice rather than an ice cream — no dairy, no eggs, just fruit, sugar, acid and water. The proportions are sound; the method assumes a hand-cranked freezer.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts of finished ice, serving 8 to 10. That is a full batch for most domestic ice cream makers, so split it if your machine holds a quart or less.
- A pound of sugarRoughly 2 1/4 cups granulated. It looks heavy, but sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than a solid block; cutting it much below about 3/4 cup per quart of liquid gives you a strawberry brick.
- The maceration hourDo not skip it. Sitting with sugar and lemon draws juice out of the fruit and dissolves most of the sugar before churning, which is the difference between a smooth ice and one that tastes gritty.
- Strain or don'tThe original leaves the mashed pulp in, which freezes into pleasant flecks. For a cleaner texture, press half the purée through a sieve to remove the seeds and return the rest.
- Freezing in a modern machineChill the mixture thoroughly first — ideally to refrigerator temperature or below — then churn 20 to 30 minutes until it looks like wet snow. Ripen it in the freezer an hour before serving.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours; the result is a granita rather than the smooth ice the original intends.
- Taste before freezingCold mutes sweetness and acidity by a noticeable margin, so the unfrozen mixture should taste slightly too sweet and too tart. Adjust the lemon to the fruit — early-season berries need less than dead-ripe ones.
Frozen desserts in American cookbooks of this era divided between ice creams, which were custard- or cream-based, and water ices or sherbets, which were fruit juice, sugar and water — cheaper, lighter, and sometimes served between courses at a long dinner as well as at its end. Strawberries were the obvious candidate: strictly seasonal, arriving in quantity all at once, and acidic enough that a squeeze of lemon and plenty of sugar was all the recipe needed. The heavy sugar is not only a period sweet tooth but physics — sugar depresses the freezing point, and without it a water ice made in a salt-and-ice churn would set too hard to serve easily.