Home › At the Fountain › Fruit Ice
Fruit Ice
Take ½ gallon of crushed cherries, 1 pint of crushed pineapple, 1 pint of crushed strawberries, 1 can of sliced pineapple (chopped), ½ dozen bananas pint sliced pineapple (chopped), 1½ dozen bananas sliced, 1 pound of chopped nuts, 1½ bottle of maraschino cherries cut in two, 1 gallon of syrup, then add an ounce of solution of citric acid, and water enough to make 3 gallons. Freeze, pack and let stand. Then serve with a little whipped cream and a cherry on top.
This is a dispenser's formula, written for a fountain that expected to sell three gallons of ice in an afternoon. Scaling it to a sixth gives about two quarts, which is as much as a home churn will hold.
- The garbled lineThe text repeats itself mid-sentence — "pint sliced pineapple (chopped), 1½ dozen bananas sliced" is a typesetting duplication of the phrase before it. Read the fruit list once: half a gallon crushed cherries, a pint each crushed pineapple and strawberries, one can sliced pineapple chopped, and somewhere between six and eighteen bananas. The banana quantity is genuinely unrecoverable from the printed page; half a dozen to the full batch is the safer reading.
- "Crushed" fruit means the fountain packCrushed cherries, pineapple and strawberries were commonly bought in tins or pails as sweetened crushed fruit packed in heavy syrup, though fountains also prepared their own. If you use fresh fruit, macerate it with sugar first or the finished ice will taste thin and freeze hard.
- SyrupA gallon of "syrup" is plain fountain simple syrup — a heavy sugar syrup, the exact proportions of which varied from manual to manual, thick enough to coat a spoon. Substituting an equal volume of thin sugar water will give you a coarse, icy result.
- Solution of citric acidFountains kept citric acid dissolved in water — strengths varied between manuals — and dosed the solution by the ounce for tartness. An ounce in three gallons is a small correction; a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice per quart of finished mix does much the same job by taste. Add it at the end and taste before freezing, since sweetness reads differently once frozen.
- Freeze, pack, let standThis is the old crank-freezer sequence: churn in the ice-and-salt bucket until stiff, then draw the dasher, pack the can in fresh ice and salt, and leave it an hour or two to ripen and firm. In a modern machine, churn to soft-serve consistency and transfer to the freezer for at least two hours; the resting step is what keeps a fruit ice from being grainy.
- Chunks and the machineA pound of chopped nuts, sliced bananas and halved maraschinos will jam most home churn dashers. Fold them in by hand after churning, before the ice goes to the freezer to harden.
- YieldThree gallons is roughly ninety-six half-cup servings. Sixth-scale gives about two quarts, or sixteen half-cup servings with whipped cream and a cherry.
- TextureWith no dairy and no egg, this is a water ice carrying a great deal of fruit pulp and sugar. It will set very hard if the syrup is skimped; if it freezes to a brick, let it stand ten minutes before scooping.
Fountain manuals of this kind were trade books, written for the man behind the marble counter rather than for a household cook, which is why the quantities start at three gallons and the ingredients are named as they came from the supplier — "crushed cherries," "solution of citric acid," "syrup" with no recipe attached. A fruit ice is distinguished from a sherbet or an ice cream by containing no milk at all: fruit, sugar syrup, acid and water, frozen in the same ice-and-salt bucket that made everything else at the fountain. The soda fountain's great commercial expansion in the United States came in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it is often said — though the point is disputed, and the expansion was already well under way before 1920 — that Prohibition accelerated it further, as drugstores and confectioners took over a good deal of the sociable drinking trade. The dressing here — whipped cream and a cherry on top — is the standard fountain finish of the era, applied to sundaes, sodas and ices alike, and the halved maraschinos folded through the mix show how thoroughly that bright, cheap, tinned cherry had become the signature of American dispensing.