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Lemon Ice
2 cups sugar ¾ cup lemon juice Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar five minutes; add lemon juice; cool, strain, and freeze. See directions for freezing, page 434.
Cup St. Jacques Serve Lemon Ice in champagne glasses. Put three-fourths teaspoon Maraschino in each glass, and garnish with bananas cut in one-fourth inch slices, and slices cut in quarters, candied cherries cut in halves, Malaga grapes from which skins and seeds have been removed, and angelica cut in strips. 4 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 cups orange juice
The page has been run together by the scanner: the trailing "4 cups water 2 cups sugar 2 cups orange juice" is the ingredient line for the orange ice that follows, and the water measurement for the lemon ice has gone missing. Read it as a plain sugar syrup, sharpened with lemon and frozen.
- The missing waterAs printed, 2 cups sugar and ¼ cup lemon juice cannot be boiled into a syrup on their own. Farmer's water ices in this section run to about 4 cups water to 2 cups sugar, so that ratio is the safe assumption — but the original quantity here is genuinely lost, and the lemon juice at ¼ cup will taste thin against a full quart of syrup. Taste before freezing and add juice until it is assertively tart; freezing mutes both sweetness and acid.
- Boil the syrup, then stopFive minutes at a rolling boil is enough to dissolve the sugar and drive off a little water. Longer and you begin concentrating toward candy, which gives a sticky ice that never sets firm.
- Add the juice off the heatAdd the juice after boiling -- The recipe adds the lemon juice once the syrup comes off the boil, before cooling and straining. Prolonged boiling dulls citrus, so adding the juice at the end is what makes the ice taste of fresh lemon rather than of lemonade powder.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe book's freezing directions on page 434 cover a hand-crank freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt; the working proportions are given there rather than in this recipe. Any modern ice cream machine does the same work. Without one, still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours — you will get a granita texture rather than the smooth ice the book intends.
- RipeningA water ice churns to a slush. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two before serving so it firms enough to scoop, and let it stand a few minutes at the table before eating.
- MaraschinoHere this means maraschino liqueur, a clear cherry distillate — Luxardo and similar bottlings are still made. It is not the red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries, which will make the glass cloyingly sweet.
- Angelica and Malaga grapesCandied angelica stem is a green confection sold by baking suppliers; candied citron or a strip of candied lime peel stands in. Malagas were large seeded table grapes; any firm seedless green grape, halved, serves the same decorative purpose without the peeling and seeding.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half, or six to eight champagne glasses served as Cup St. Jacques.
Water ices reached American cookery through France and Italy, and by the end of the nineteenth century a well-run household kitchen was expected to produce them at home on a hand-crank freezer — the ice ordered from the iceman, the rock salt kept in the pantry. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives page after page of them, mostly on this same skeleton of sugar syrup plus fruit juice, because the formula scales and because a tart ice was the conventional thing to serve between heavy courses at a long dinner as well as at dessert. Cup St. Jacques is the dressed-up version: fruit and liqueur over ice in a stemmed glass, a service generally traced to the French restaurant repertoire and carried into American entertaining as a course that looked expensive and cost very little. The garnish list — angelica, Malaga grapes, candied cherries — reads as a small inventory of what a turn-of-the-century grocer stocked for exactly this kind of showing off.