Currant Ice
Make currant water ice the same as the strawberry ice preceding, except that no whole fruit need be saved out. Cooked or canned currants are not suitable, being too gelatinous and of poor color, and only the best and ripest of the fresh fruit should b employed for this purpose. The most luscious currants do not grow in America.
The hotel pastry cook has very little need of artificial coloring. The rich colors of the various fruits in their season may be preserved with but slight trouble by taking the surplus juices and boiling them with plenty of sugar, often in the same kettle the fruit was cooked in for pie, and straining the syrup into bottles. Such syrups will keep a long time and while the writer is well aware that any elaborate process of the sort would never be put in practice in hotel work, he can recommend the seizing upon such things as come to hand this way as positive labor-saving expedients. A bottle of strawberry or raspberry syrup put away at an odd time comes splendidly in place to mix with a freezer of cream in the winter or spring.
The instructions here are a cross-reference rather than a formula, so the working numbers have to come from the strawberry water ice it points back to. What the passage does supply is the important part: which currants to use and which to reject.
- Which currantThese are fresh red or white currants (Ribes), sold in small clusters in midsummer, not the dried Zante currants of the baking aisle. Nothing dried will work here.
- Working proportionsThe passage gives none, so they have to come from the strawberry water ice it refers back to. Water ices of the period commonly fall somewhere in the region of 1 quart fruit juice or puree to 1 quart water with 1 to 1 1/2 lb sugar, adjusted by taste and by the acidity of the fruit. Currants are sharp, so expect to sit at the upper end of the sugar; a syrup that tastes slightly too sweet at room temperature will taste correct when frozen.
- Why no cooked or canned fruitCurrants are among the most pectin-rich of the soft fruits. Cooking extracts that pectin, which is why the author calls cooked currants gelatinous and dull-colored. Crush the raw fruit, press out the juice through a jelly bag or fine sieve, and dissolve the sugar in it cold or with only gentle warming.
- "Freezer"In the author's usage this means the hand-crank can packed in cracked ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the syrup thoroughly first; churn about 20-25 minutes, then firm it in the freezer for an hour or two. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- The surplus-juice syrupsBoiled fruit syrup bottled off hot is not preserved food by current standards. Treat it as a refrigerator syrup, keep it in the cold and use it within a few weeks, or freeze it in portions. Discard anything cloudy, fizzing or moldy.
- YieldA quart of juice made up as above gives roughly 2 quarts of finished ice, enough for eight to ten servings.
Currants were a staple of English and northern European ices and jellies long before they were common in American kitchens, and the author's aside that "the most luscious currants do not grow in America" reflects a real gap: the fruit ripens best in cool summers, and the large, sweet-tart cultivars of Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia were not much grown here. Within a generation of this book the situation got worse rather than better, as Ribes plantings across much of the United States were destroyed under federal and state programs aimed at white pine blister rust, for which currants and gooseberries are an alternate host; restrictions in some states lasted into the late twentieth century. The rest of the passage is a hotel pastry cook's economy: the juice left in the kettle after a batch of pie fruit was boiled up with sugar and bottled, so that a winter freezer of cream could be flavored and colored without recourse to bottled artificial colors, for which the author says the hotel pastry cook has very little need.