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Red Cherry Ice
4 pints of sweet red or black cherries. 2 pints of water. 1 1/2 pounds of sugar.
Mash the fruit raw and thoroughly so as to break the stones, and strain the juice through a fine strainer into the freezer. Boil the cherry pulp with some of the sugar and water to extract the flavor from the kernels, and mash that also through the strainer, add the other pint of water and the sugar and freeze. Use no egg whites and only beat the ice enough to make it even and smooth.
This is a water ice built deliberately around the flavour of crushed cherry stones, and that is precisely the problem: the kernels inside are the point of the method and also the reason it should not be made.
- The stones are the hazardCherry kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. When the kernel tissue is crushed and wetted, the plant's own enzyme releases hydrogen cyanide. The recipe does not merely tolerate broken stones, it instructs you to mash the fruit "thoroughly so as to break the stones" and then to boil the pulp specifically "to extract the flavor from the kernels."
- Scale is not trivialFour pints of cherries is a large number of stones, all crushed, with the resulting liquid strained into the finished ice rather than discarded. There is no way to know from the text how much kernel material ends up in the batch, and no measured limit is given anywhere in the method.
- Boiling is not a safeguardBoiling is not a safeguard here -- heat does deactivate the enzyme and drive off some of the released cyanide, but the recipe gives neither a time nor a temperature for that step, and the raw strained juice is never heated at all. Home cooks cannot verify the result. Commercial noyau and kernel flavourings are generally made under controlled conditions and subject to residue limits; a kitchen cannot replicate that.
- What the flavour was forThe bitter-almond note the pastry cook is chasing here is the same one sought in ratafia, noyau and persipan. If that is what you want in a cherry ice, a current recipe using a small quantity of pure almond extract gives the same aromatic effect with none of this method's risk.
- "Into the freezer"In a recipe of this period the freezer would be the hand-cranked ice-cream can set in a bucket of ice and salt, not an appliance. The instruction to beat the ice "only enough to make it even and smooth" is consistent with that: a water ice worked too hard becomes foamy rather than dense.
- Why no egg whitesEgg white was often used in period ices to give body and a paler, softer texture. Here the recipe simply directs that it be left out, without saying why.
Cherry kernels have long been used as a flavouring in Europe, most familiarly in noyau liqueurs and in almond-scented cherry preserves, where the bitter-almond aroma is treated as inseparable from the fruit. Recipes of this kind do call for cracking stones or steeping kernels to obtain that flavour. Amygdalin had been isolated and studied by chemists earlier in the nineteenth century, and the poisonous character of bitter almonds and prussic acid was itself widely discussed; what is clear is that trade books of the period passed the practice of crushing stones along without comment. The recipe also shows a confectioner's economy: the pulp left after straining is boiled with sugar and water and pushed through a second time to recover more flavour and body before freezing.