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Laboratory Exercises (Lemon Ice qt water C sugar C)
Lemon Ice. 1 qt. water 2 C. sugar C. lemon juice 1/2 t. vanilla extract 1. Boil sugar and water together for 10 minutes. 2. Cool the syrup and add the lemon juice. 3. Turn into the freezer and freeze.
Orange Ice. 1 qt. water 2 C. sugar Make the same as lemon ice.
Pineapple Ice. 1 qt. water 2 C. sugar 2 C. orange juice 3/4 C. lemon juice 1/4 C. lemon juice 1 can pineapple or 1 fresh pineapple
A water ice in three flavours, printed as a school laboratory exercise so students could compare syrup ratios. The transcription has lost some quantities, so read the amounts with care before you begin.
- The missing quantitiesThe lemon juice amount for the lemon ice has dropped out, and the fruit amounts printed under the pineapple ice (2 cups orange juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice) look as though they belong to the orange ice. For a quart of water and 2 cups sugar, something in the region of a cup of lemon juice would match the balance the other versions suggest, but the figure is a guess, not the book's.
- C. and t.C. is a cup (8 fl oz) and t. is a teaspoon. A quart is 4 cups, so the finished mixture runs to roughly 6 cups of liquid before freezing, allowing for what boils away.
- "The freezer" is a crank churnIn domestic-science texts of this kind the freezer is a hand-cranked wooden pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, not a compartment of a refrigerator. Any modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- Cool the syrup fullyAdding citrus juice to hot syrup drives off the volatile oils that carry the fresh flavour. Chill the syrup before adding the juice, and add the vanilla at the same time.
- Ten minutes of boiling mattersThat much boiling concentrates the syrup noticeably. Sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than solid, so if you reduce the sugar the result will freeze hard as a brick.
- The pineappleCanned pineapple was commonly packed in syrup; if yours is, drain it, purée or crush it, and count its syrup as part of the sweetening. Fresh pineapple should be puréed and strained.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. Water ices were served in small glasses partway through a formal dinner, or as the dessert course in warm weather.
This page comes from a manual written for school and college domestic-science laboratories, where cookery was taught as a sequence of controlled experiments rather than as a set of family recipes. Presenting lemon, orange and pineapple ice together with a single fixed syrup base looks, from the layout, like the point of the exercise: students would learn one water-ice formula and then vary the fruit, observing how acid and pulp changed the texture of the frozen product, though the page does not say so outright. Water ices themselves were long established by then, made with a sugar syrup and fruit juice and frozen in a salt-and-ice pail, a technique that had spread through American households after cheap manufactured ice and the crank freezer became common in the later nineteenth century. Canned pineapple appearing alongside fresh is worth noting, since canning had made the fruit an ordinary pantry item in places where fresh pineapple was still a novelty.