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Maraschino Ice
Prepare Orange Ice mixture, freeze to a mush, flavor with Maraschino, and finish freezing. Serve in frappé glasses.
A two-line variation that assumes you have already turned to the book's Orange Ice and own a crank freezer. The whole trick is when the liqueur goes in.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrupy red bottled cherries sold under that name today. Maraschino is a clear cherry liqueur from Dalmatia, distilled from the fruit with its pits; Luxardo is the brand most easily found. A sweet cherry cordial will read as candied rather than almond-bitter.
- Why it is added lateAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so stirring it in at the start makes the mixture slower and harder to set firm. Freezing the base to a mush first and then adding the liqueur is most likely why the instruction is worded this way. The recipe specifies no quantity; a few tablespoons per quart of mixture is a reasonable modern amount.
- The baseFarmer's Orange Ice is a plain water ice: a boiled sugar syrup, cooled, with orange juice and a little lemon juice added and the whole strained. Follow that recipe as printed; there is no dairy and no egg here.
- "Freeze to a mush"The stage at which the paddle meets resistance but the mixture still slumps; the book gives no timing. In a modern machine it is the point at which the ice pulls away from the sides in soft ribbons.
- If you have no ice-cream freezerStill-freeze it in a shallow metal pan, raking with a fork every 20 to 30 minutes until it is granular, then stir in the maraschino during the last rake. The result is closer to a granita than to the smooth churned ice the book intends.
- Ice and salt proportionsFor a hand-crank freezer, pack with about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. Table salt dissolves too fast and gives an uneven brine.
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses, about 3 to 4 ounces, served semi-frozen and spooned. Chill them first; the ice softens fast at room temperature because of the alcohol.
- YieldA quart of Orange Ice base serves six to eight in frappé glasses, or four in ordinary dessert dishes.
Maraschino is distilled from the Marasca sour cherry, pits and all, and was long associated with Zadar on the Dalmatian coast; by the late nineteenth century it was a fixture of American hotel and restaurant service, splashed into punches, fruit cups and ices. In Farmer, frappé denotes a mixture frozen only to a mush, served in glasses rather than on plates. The brevity of the entry is characteristic of this section of the book: Farmer establishes a handful of base mixtures, then runs variations off them in a line or two, trusting the reader to page back. It also marks a period habit that Prohibition would soon interrupt, after which the word maraschino in American kitchens drifted away from the liqueur and attached itself to dyed, sweetened cherries that no longer had any of it in them.