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Strawberry Ice
2 quarts of strawberries--red ripe and sweet. 2 pounds of sugar. 3 pin's of water.
Cover the strawberries with the sugar and let them remain some time to form a thick red syrup Pick out a few of the berries to be mixed in the ice at last. Rub the rest through a strainer into the freezer with the syrup and add the water. Freeze without much beating if a crimson ice is wanted, and add coloring if necessary. Throw the reserved berries on top of the strawberry ice in the freezer and mix them in when the ice is to be served.
A water ice rather than a sherbet or cream: fruit, sugar and water only, churned as little as possible to keep the color deep. The whole thing hinges on the maceration and on restraint at the freezer.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of strawberries is roughly 3 lb whole, about 2 1/2 lb once hulled. Two pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups, and 3 pints of water is 6 cups.
- Let the syrup formCovering the fruit with sugar and leaving it an hour or two draws out juice by osmosis and dissolves the sugar without heat, so nothing is cooked and the flavor stays raw and bright. Do not rush this by warming it.
- "Freezer" means the machineThe freezer here would have been a hand-crank churn: an inner canister set in a bucket of crushed ice and rock salt, dasher turned by hand. A modern ice cream maker does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita-like texture.
- Why not much beatingChurning whips in air, which lightens both body and color. Minimal agitation gives the dense crimson ice the recipe is after, at the cost of a harder, more crystalline set. Expect to temper it 10 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
- Skip the coloringCochineal and, later, aniline reds were both in use in nineteenth-century kitchens. Ripe berries plus a squeeze of lemon juice will hold the color better; the acid also keeps a sugar-and-water ice from tasting flat.
- Sugar and freezing pointThis much sugar in 6 cups of water is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than solid. Cutting the sugar substantially will give you a block of sweet ice, so adjust by using less water instead.
- The reserved berriesWhole berries frozen through the churning turn to icy pebbles. Adding them at the end, as directed, keeps them soft enough to eat; halve or quarter large ones first.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts, or 12 to 16 servings as a course between richer dishes.
Water ices like this one were the cheap end of frozen work: no cream, no eggs, nothing that would spoil in a hot kitchen. Professional manuals could assume them because commercially harvested lake ice, packed in sawdust and shipped by rail, had made a bucket of ice and rock salt an ordinary summer expense in hotels, restaurants and steamboat galleys. The instruction to "add coloring if necessary" reflects a period habit of insisting on a uniform crimson regardless of the fruit. Serving a fruit ice partway through a long menu, to clear the palate before the roast, was standard practice in the same establishments this book was written for.