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Frozen Fruit in Ices
Broadly speaking it may be said, everybody that likes fruit ices or sherbets likes the frozen pieces of fruit scattered through them as well. But there are differences which it would be tedious to point in each case depending upon the degree of sweetness of the fruit. Strawberries containing little or no sugar will freeze in a strawberry water ice too unreasonably solid to be good, while sweet Tokay and Muscat grapes, sweet ripe cherries, mellow pears and the like will never become too hard because the sugar in them prevents it. The sweeter an article, whether cream or fruit, the harder it is to freeze. To keep the fruits from this too solid congealing some of the French ways steep them in alcoholic liquers--methods which we merely mention for information without believing them necessary to practice. In case of a peach ice, then, it may do very well when the peaches are very sweet and ripe to drop the quarters in at the end of the freezing without any preparation; but if the peaches instead are inclined to sourness stew them in thick syrup without breaking the quarters and drop in the ice after first making them cold.
This is a working note on technique rather than a measured formula: how to keep pieces of fruit suspended in an ice from freezing into pebbles. The physics behind it is sound and still worth applying.
- The hinge: sugar controls hardnessSugar depresses the freezing point, so a sweet fruit stays yielding at freezer temperature while a tart, low-sugar fruit turns to stone. Everything else here follows from that one fact.
- "Thick syrup"The text gives no proportions. It means a heavy syrup, denser than a thin pouring syrup; period usage varied, so work from a sugar-heavy syrup boiled only to dissolve. Simmer the fruit gently in it so the pieces absorb sugar without collapsing.
- Chill before addingThe instruction to make the stewed fruit cold first is not fussiness. Warm fruit dropped into a churning ice melts a pocket around itself and coarsens the crystal structure of the whole batch.
- When to addAt the end of freezing, once the ice has taken but before it is packed to ripen. On a modern machine, add in the last minute of churning or fold in by hand before transferring to the freezer.
- Tokay and MuscatBoth are sweet table grapes, which is why the passage cites them; Muscat is still easy to find, Tokay less so. Any very sweet grape behaves the same way. Seed and halve them.
- The liqueur methodSteeping fruit in spirits works because alcohol depresses the freezing point further still, on top of the sugar. The author dismisses it as unnecessary; it does soften the pieces noticeably, at the cost of flavouring them.
- StrawberriesA low-sugar strawberry freezes hard, as the passage says. Macerating the fruit in sugar for an hour and using the drawn-off juice in the ice base gives better results than dropping the berries in raw.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the trade literature written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments rather than for the home, which is why the passage reasons about principles instead of giving quantities: the reader was expected to be adjusting a formula on the bench, not following one. Ices and water ices were a staple of the late nineteenth-century American hotel menu, churned in hand-cranked vertical freezers packed with ice and rock salt, then packed away to ripen. The French practice mentioned here of steeping fruit in liqueur is a genuine confectioner's technique of the period, and the slight sniff at it is of a kind often noted in American trade writing of the era, which is sometimes said to have measured itself against Parisian precedent while insisting it had no need of it. The underlying observation about sugar and freezing point was well understood empirically long before pastry cooks framed it in chemical terms; it is the same principle that governs how a modern ice cream base is balanced.