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Grape Fruit Ice
(One-half gallon.) 2 grapefruits. 3 lemons. 2 cups sugar. 2 pints water. Squeeze juice from lemons. Put sugar rind and one pint of water on fire, let boil five minutes; when cool, add rest of water and fruit juices. Put in freezer, and when it begins to freeze add the shredded grape fruit. Serve in glass cups with Marischino cherry garnish.
A plain water ice built on a boiled syrup, written for a hand-cranked freezer. The ingredient list is terse and one line of it is garbled, so read the whole thing before starting.
- "Sugar rind" is a typo"Sugar rind" is almost certainly a typo for "sugar, rind" — the sugar plus rind, boiled with the 1 pint of water. The text does not say which fruit's rind is meant, nor does it say to strain; paring the zest from the lemons and straining it out before freezing is a sensible reading of the line, not what the page states.
- YieldHalf a gallon, as stated, which is generous. Portion counts are guesswork — a between-course ice was served in small glasses and would stretch a good deal further than the same quantity served as dessert.
- "Put in freezer"This means a churn freezer — an insulated bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked until stiff. A modern electric ice cream maker does the same job; a shallow pan in the deep freeze, raked with a fork every twenty minutes, gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- "Shredded grape fruit"Peeled segments with the membrane stripped off and the flesh broken into shreds. Add it once the mix has thickened to slush, otherwise the pulp sinks and freezes into a solid raft at the bottom.
- Sugar and freezingTwo cups of sugar in two pints of water plus juice is what keeps this scoopable; cutting the sugar much below that will give you a block of ice. If it is too sweet for your taste, add more lemon rather than less sugar.
- The fruit has changedGrapefruit of Wilson's day — the seedy Duncan, though the seedless Marsh was also common — was generally more bitter than a modern Ruby Red or Star Ruby. With today's sweeter varieties the full three lemons are welcome, and pink fruit will tint the ice faintly rose.
- Maraschino cherriesThe garnish then was an Italian marasca cherry in liqueur; the bright red supermarket version is a brined sweet cherry dyed and syruped. Cherries in kirsch or a proper luxardo-style jar are closer to the intent.
- Texture on standingServe it straight from the churn or after no more than an hour or two of ripening. Water ices set hard and grainy after a day in a modern freezer, which runs far colder than an ice-and-salt bucket.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspaper readers and the Ladies' Home Journal in the years around the First World War, and her books are full of frozen desserts because domestic churn freezers were by then cheap and commonplace while household refrigeration was not. Grapefruit is the telling ingredient: it was still something of a novelty in American kitchens, popularised by Florida growers in the decades either side of 1900 and generally eaten halved at breakfast with sugar to blunt its bitterness. A water ice — sugar syrup, water and fruit juice, with no dairy or egg — was the cheapest thing a freezer could make, and in formal service of the period a small glass of it arrived between courses to reset the palate rather than at the end of the meal. The maraschino cherry on top is pure 1920s restaurant styling, the same flourish that finished off fruit cocktails and grapefruit halves in the same era.