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Grape-Fruit Frappé
1 quart water 2 cups sugar 1½ cups grape-fruit juice 1½ cups lemon juice Boil the sugar and water for fifteen minutes; cool thoroughly; add the fruit juice; strain and freeze to a mush. Serve in grapefruit skins.
A plain sugar-syrup ice with no dairy or egg, so the only real variables are the syrup density and how you handle the freezing. Note that the lemon is equal in volume to the grapefruit, which makes this considerably sharper than a modern grapefruit sorbet.
- What the syrup should measureBoiling 1 quart of water with 2 cups sugar for fifteen minutes drives off a fair amount of water, so the syrup will measure noticeably less than the volume you started with; how much less depends on the width of your pan. If you shortcut the boil the syrup will be thinner and the frappé correspondingly icier.
- Cool thoroughly means coldChill the syrup to refrigerator temperature before the juice goes in. Adding citrus juice to warm syrup dulls the aroma, which is the whole point of a frappé made from raw juice.
- The lemon is not a typo, but it is severeA cup and a half of lemon juice is eight to twelve lemons and gives a frappé closer to a lemon ice tinted with grapefruit. Tasting the mix before freezing is sensible; cold blunts both sweetness and acid, so it should taste slightly too sweet and too sharp at room temperature.
- Freeze to a mushIn an ice-cream freezer this means turning until the mixture is thick slush and stopping there, not churning it firm. In a modern machine, run it 10-15 minutes; still-frozen in a shallow pan, scrape with a fork every 20-30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- No alcohol, no invert sugarNo alcohol -- There is no spirit here, so the sugar is the only thing keeping the texture loose, and the frappé will set firm in a home freezer. Make it the day it is served, or let it stand 15 minutes and rework with a fork.
- StrainingStrain after the juices are combined and before freezing, to catch pulp, seeds and membrane; the membrane is where the bitterness sits, and it is worth keeping out of the finished ice.
- The grapefruit skinsHalve the fruit, juice it, then cut out the membrane with a curved knife and scrape the shells clean. Chill or briefly freeze the empty shells so they do not melt the frappé on contact.
- YieldDepends on how far the syrup reduces; somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 quarts, enough to fill roughly six to ten grapefruit halves.
Frappé, from the French for "iced" or "struck," entered American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century as the loosest of the frozen desserts: a water ice churned only to slush, served between courses or at afternoon receptions rather than at the end of dinner. Its appearance in a household manual of this period says a good deal about grapefruit itself, which was still a comparatively new commercial fruit in American markets; Florida and Texas groves expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century. Serving an ice back in the hollowed shell was a standard trick of the era, cheap theatre that required no moulds and no extra china.