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Concord Grape Ice
A reddish purple, useful for combinations and for Neapolitan or tri-colored ices. 4 ounces of ripe Concord grapes--a cupful. 1 pound of sugar. 1 quart of water. Juice of one lemon.
Mash the grapes and sugar together raw, add the lemon juice and water, strain into a freezer with all the pulp obtainable, and freeze at once. The ice becomes lighter colored the more it is beaten. The lemon juice helps to brighten it. The grapes should not be scalded or cooked.
A water ice rather than a sherbet: no dairy, no egg, no cooking. The whole point is that the fruit is never heated, so the color and the musky Concord aroma survive into the frozen product.
- Do not cook the grapesThe final line is the hinge. Heating Concords turns the flavor jammy and the color brownish-purple; mashed raw with sugar, they stay bright and floral. Mash them thoroughly, skins and all, and let the mixture stand ten or fifteen minutes so the sugar draws out juice and pigment before you strain.
- The quantity is contradictoryFour ounces of grapes is light for a cupful; a cup of whole Concords runs closer to 5 or 6 ounces. Go by the cupful; four ounces will give a pale ice against a pound of sugar.
- "Freezer" means the churnIn this period this is the hand-crank bucket freezer with an ice-and-salt jacket. A modern ice cream machine does the same job. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- StrainingConcords are slip-skin and full of seeds, so straining is not optional. Push the mash through a medium sieve rather than fine cheesecloth — the instruction to keep "all the pulp obtainable" is what gives the ice body, since there is no cream or egg to do it.
- Sugar is structuralOne pound of sugar to one quart of water is roughly a 32 percent syrup by weight, and that is deliberate: it keeps the ice from freezing into a solid block. Cutting the sugar to taste will give you a purple ice cube.
- On the colorThe note that beating lightens the ice is accurate — air whipped in scatters light. For a Neapolitan layer you want it churned briskly; for a deep-toned single serving, churn only until it holds.
- Yield and seasonAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts, or six to eight small servings. Concords are a short-season grape, roughly September into October in the northern states; unsweetened bottled Concord juice is the off-season substitute, though it has been pasteurized and will taste cooked.
Concord grapes were selected in Concord, Massachusetts, by Ephraim Bull and introduced commercially in the 1850s; within a generation they were the default American grape for juice, jelly and confectionery, valued for a hardiness that European wine grapes lacked in New England. That is why a professional pastry book of this period treats the flavor as a staple rather than a novelty. The entry's opening line tells you its real job in a working kitchen: it is a color as much as a flavor, the reddish-purple band in a molded Neapolitan or tri-colored ice, alongside a white and a yellow or green. Water ices of this kind — fruit, sugar, water, a squeeze of lemon to sharpen both taste and hue — were the cheap and showy end of the frozen-dessert repertoire, served between courses at long dinners or turned out of a mold at the end of one.