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Currant Ice
4 cups water. 1½ cups sugar 2 cups currant juice Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I.
Two lines of print that depend entirely on a recipe printed a few pages earlier. Here is what the cross-reference supplies and what a modern freezer changes.
- The missing liquidAs written there is no water at all, because Raspberry Ice I supplies it: sugar boiled with water to make a syrup, which is then combined with the fruit juice. Check the earlier recipe for the exact quantity of water and the boiling time. Without that dilution, 2 cups of juice and 1½ cups of sugar would freeze into a dense, cloying block.
- Do not cook the juiceIf you can, boil the sugar and water on their own and let the syrup cool before adding the currant juice. Heating dulls the fresh flavour of the fruit, though it will not reduce its acidity.
- Getting 2 cups of juiceReckon on roughly 2 to 2½ lb of red currants. Crush them with a splash of water, warm gently to break the fruit, then drain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth. Do not press hard if you want a clear ice.
- Acid and pectinCurrants are high in both. The high sugar concentration keeps the mixture soft and slow to set, and the pectin gives it a slightly thicker, more clinging body. Taste the cold mixture before freezing and add a little more syrup if it makes your jaw ache; cold mutes sweetness.
- "Freeze" in 1896The original assumes a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, turned for 20 to 30 minutes. In an ice cream machine, churn the thoroughly chilled mixture until it holds a soft ribbon, about 20 to 25 minutes.
- RipeningAfter churning, pack the ice into a chilled container and let it firm in the freezer for an hour or two. The book's freezing directions call for repacking the can in fresh ice and salt and covering it.
- Yield and servingWith the syrup from the cross-referenced recipe this makes appreciably more than a quart, serving eight or so in small glasses. Water ices of this kind were served in modest portions, either between courses or at the end of the meal.
Red currants (Ribes rubrum) were a staple of New England kitchen gardens when this book appeared in 1896, valued for a tartness and natural pectin that made them the standard jelly fruit of the Northeast. That same sharpness suited a water ice, which in the period was distinct from ice cream: a sugar syrup and fruit juice frozen with no dairy, served in small glasses as a palate cleanser between heavy courses or as a light finish. The abbreviated form of the recipe, three ingredients and a cross-reference, is characteristic of Fannie Farmer's method throughout the ices chapter, where one full set of directions governs a dozen fruit variations. Currants themselves became harder to come by in the United States after the 1910s, when the bushes were identified as a host for white pine blister rust and cultivation was restricted in many states; some of those bans stood for decades, which is one reason a fruit taken for granted in this book now reads as unfamiliar.