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Frozen Cranberries
4 cups cranberries 1½ cups boiling water 2¼ cups sugar Pick over and wash cranberries, add water and sugar, and cook ten minutes, skimming during the cooking. Rub through a sieve, cool, and pour into one-pound bakingpowder boxes. Pack in salt and ice, using equal parts, and let stand four hours. If there is not sufficient mixture to fill two boxes, add water to make up the desired quantity. Serve as a substitute for cranberry sauce or jelly.
A cranberry water ice in all but name, meant to be moulded rather than churned, and served alongside roast poultry instead of the usual sauce.
- The sugar quantityThe sugar is printed as "214 cups," almost certainly a mangled 2¼ cups. Sweeten the strained purée to taste before freezing, remembering that anything frozen tastes noticeably less sweet than it does warm.
- Baking-powder boxesThese were cylindrical tins holding roughly two cups, pressed into service as improvised moulds. Small straight-sided tins, ramekins, or a small loaf pan lined with plastic wrap serve the same purpose.
- Salt and ice in equal partsA saltier mixture than the one part salt to three of ice often given for churning ice cream; the brine can fall to around -6F, which sets the mixture hard and coarse, and that is what a moulded ice wants. A domestic freezer at 0F will do the same job, given four to six hours.
- No churningNothing is stirred here, so the result is solid and crystalline rather than smooth. If you want a lighter texture, scrape it with a fork every hour as it firms, which turns it into a granita.
- Sieving mattersCranberry skins do not soften enough to disappear, and frozen they read as tough flecks. Press the cooked fruit through a sieve or work it in a blender and then strain; skip this and the texture suffers more than in an unfrozen sauce.
- Ten minutes is enoughCranberries burst and release their pectin within a few minutes of boiling. Longer cooking only drives off water and deepens the colour toward brown.
- Adding water to fill the mouldsTopping up with plain water to fill a second tin dilutes both flavour and sugar. Better to freeze the smaller quantity in a smaller vessel.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, enough for eight to ten as a relish. Unmould onto a cold plate and slice, or scoop; let it stand a few minutes out of the freezer so it is not glassy.
This one is cranberry sauce by another route: the same berries, sugar and water, put through a sieve and frozen stiff to be served cold against hot roast poultry. The method depends on the ice-and-salt freezing that a household with an ice-box would already have understood, and on the discarded tin as free equipment — one-pound baking-powder boxes were a common cylindrical container in an American kitchen of the period, and were used for moulding ices. Cranberries themselves were a regional staple long before they were a national one; commercial bog cultivation on Cape Cod was under way from early in the nineteenth century and expanding through its middle decades, which is why four cups of them could be treated as an unremarkable purchase.