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Cider Frappe
1 1/2 cups sugar 1 pint water 1 quart sweet cider 2 cups orange-juice 1/2 cup lemon-juice Boil sugar and water together for five minutes. Add cider and fruit-juices. Cool, strain and freeze to a mush.
A simple sugar-syrup ice with cider and citrus, frozen only to the slushy stage rather than to a firm block. The whole point is texture, so stop while it still collapses under a spoon.
- Sweet cider"Sweet" here means unfermented apple cider, not hard cider. Use fresh, unfiltered, unsweetened apple cider; ordinary clear apple juice works but gives a thinner, flatter result.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups and a quart is 4 cups, so the mixture is about 2 quarts of liquid before freezing. The recipe gives no yield; that quantity would fill roughly eight to ten small glasses.
- The syrupFive minutes at a boil is enough to dissolve the sugar and drive off a little water; it should not colour or thread. Note that the recipe adds the cider and juices to the hot syrup and cools the whole mixture afterwards -- cooling the syrup first is a modern departure from the text.
- StrainingStrain after mixing rather than before. Cider sediment and citrus pulp both settle out, and a clear base freezes to a cleaner, less gritty mush.
- Freezing to a mushThe recipe names no apparatus; a mixture like this would most likely have been churned in a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and salt and stopped early. In a home machine, ten to fifteen minutes should do. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every half hour for a few hours.
- Sugar levelThe sugar is doing structural work as well as sweetening; cutting it much below 1 1/2 cups will give you a solid block of ice rather than a frappe. If the citrus is very sweet, reduce by no more than a quarter cup.
- ServingServe immediately in chilled glasses. A frappe holds its texture for minutes, not hours, and refreezing turns it hard.
Frappe derives from the French frapper, to strike, used of drinks and mixtures chilled or iced -- here a mixture frozen only to a coarse slush rather than churned smooth. Frappes appear in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, listed alongside the sherbets and the punches and served in small glasses either as a dessert or between courses. Sweet, unfermented cider was a common ingredient in such recipes; it was also the standard household term for unfermented cider long before Prohibition (1920-1933), so a cider frappe need not be read as a response to the dry years.