Home › Strawberry and Raspberry › Iced Strawberry
Iced Strawberry
Fill a small glass half full of finely cracked ice, add three tablespoonfuls of crushed strawberries or any other fruit in season, and the juice of half a lemon. Mix well and serve with a spoon.
A soda-fountain style fruit ice, closer to a spoonable slush than a drink. The whole thing depends on the ice being finely cracked rather than cubed.
- Fine ice, not cubesCracked ice at a period fountain was shaved or pounded in a canvas bag with a mallet, ending up somewhere between snow and gravel. Pulse cubes briefly in a food processor or crush them in a towel; whole cubes will not take up the syrup and you get flavored water at the bottom.
- "Crushed strawberries" meant sweetened"Crushed strawberries" was probably sweetened -- in fountain usage crushed fruit was often a prepared stock: berries mashed with sugar (formularies vary in proportion, some approaching equal weight) and left to stand until syrupy. Plain mashed raw berries with lemon juice will read as sour and thin, so consider mashing the fruit with sugar and letting it sit 20 minutes before using.
- Glass sizeA "small glass" is likely something on the order of a 6 to 8 oz tumbler. Three tablespoons of fruit and half a lemon suits that sort of volume; in a tall glass the flavor disappears.
- The lemonHalf a lemon is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons of juice, which is a lot against three tablespoons of fruit. It is there to keep the sugared berries from tasting flat. Taste and hold some back if your berries are already tart.
- Other fruit in seasonRaspberries, crushed peaches and cherries all work on the same sugar-and-stand method. Melon and banana are less suited: both are low in acid, and banana has too little juice to make a syrup.
- Serve at onceThere is no stabilizer here and nothing keeps the ice suspended. Mix in the glass and hand it over; on standing it separates into syrup below and pale ice above.
- YieldOne glass. Scale by the glass rather than mixing a batch, since standing ruins the texture.
Soda-fountain and temperance publications of the early twentieth century were, among other things, recipe books for the saloon's replacement: the drugstore soda fountain. Books of this kind collected fruit ices, phosphates, egg drinks and shrubs to prove that a man could stand at a counter and be served something cold and interesting without alcohol. The formula here is the plainest version of the fountain's stock in trade — crushed fruit, acid, ice — and it draws on the jars of sugared "crushed fruit" that fountains commonly kept through berry season and put up in quantity for the rest of the year. Served with a spoon rather than a straw, it sits at the point where a drink becomes an ice, the same territory the Italian granita occupies.