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Fruit Granite
2 cups sugar 1 quart water 1 pint fruit 1 pint fruit juice Boil the sugar and water for five minutes; scald the fruits in the syrup for one minute; skim them out and add to the syrup one pint of fruit juice. Strain and freeze when cold. Freeze soft; stir in the cooked fruit and serve in sherbet glasses.
A simple sugar-syrup ice with whole fruit stirred through it. The only real difficulty is that the original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and salt, which changes what "freeze soft" means.
- Quantities in modern terms2 cups sugar, 4 cups water, about 2 cups prepared fruit and 2 cups fruit juice. That comes to well over two quarts of mixture before freezing.
- The syrup is deliberately lightOne part sugar to two parts water, then diluted further with juice, gives a low-sugar mix that freezes hard and grainy — which is the point of a granite. Do not reduce the sugar further or it will set into a solid block.
- Scald, do not cookOne minute in the hot syrup is all the recipe allows. Berries and sliced peaches collapse quickly past that; skim them out promptly and cool them separately.
- Fruit juiceBottled or freshly pressed juice both work, but taste after the juice goes in. A tart juice — currant, sour cherry, lemon-spiked orange — keeps the syrup from tasting flat once frozen, since cold dulls sweetness.
- "Freeze when cold"Chill the strained mixture thoroughly, ideally overnight, before it goes into the machine. Base put in warm melts the surrounding ice and produces a coarse, watery texture rather than a crisp one.
- Without an ice-cream freezerPour the strained mix into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for two to three hours until it is a heap of loose crystals. Stir the reserved fruit in at the last raking, as the original directs.
- "Freeze soft"Stop while the ice still takes a spoon easily — it should mound, not hold a scoop. The cooked fruit is folded in at that stage so the pieces stay suspended instead of sinking, and the whole thing is served at once.
Granite is the English spelling of the French granité, a name generally traced to its graininess and often said to evoke the texture of the stone: an ice stirred little enough that the crystals stay visible on the tongue, as distinct from the smooth churned creams and the whipped, half-frozen mousses that fill the rest of a frozen-desserts chapter. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried a whole vocabulary of these water ices — the sherbets, frappés, granites, sorbets, punches — distinguished mainly by sugar level, aeration and whether spirits or beaten egg white went in. The plain sugar-and-water syrup here serves as a base common to many of them. Serving in sherbet glasses, rather than as a plated dessert, marks it as the light course it was meant to be: something offered between heavier dishes or at the close of a warm-weather meal.