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Pomegranate Ice
Same as Orange Ice, made from blood oranges.
Raspberry Ice I 4 cups water 1 2/3 cups sugar 2 cups raspberry juice 2 tablespoons lemon juice Make a syrup as for Lemon Ice, cool, add raspberries mashed, and squeezed through double cheese-cloth, and lemon juice; strain and freeze.
Two recipes run together here: a one-line cross-reference for Pomegranate Ice, and the full method for Raspberry Ice I. Both depend on the syrup base given earlier under Lemon Ice, so the instructions only make sense read alongside it.
- The name is misleadingDespite the title, no pomegranate is involved. Farmer's Pomegranate Ice is orange ice made with blood oranges; the name most likely refers to the deep red colour, though the book does not say so. If you want actual pomegranate ice, substitute the juice one for one and expect a slightly more astringent, tannic result.
- The syrup base"Make a syrup as for Lemon Ice" refers back to the Lemon Ice recipe, where the water and sugar are boiled together for twenty minutes and then cooled completely. Do not shortcut this to a quick dissolve.
- Chill before churning"Cool" means thoroughly cold, refrigerator cold. A base put into the freezer at room temperature will churn slowly and come out coarse.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessRoughly 1 2/3 cups sugar to six cups of liquid is what keeps the ice soft enough to scoop. Cutting the sugar because the fruit tastes sweet will give you a solid pink brick.
- Straining the raspberriesMashing and squeezing through doubled cheesecloth removes seeds and pulp. A fine mesh sieve does the same job faster; press hard, then discard the seeds. Two cups of juice takes roughly 2 lb of raspberries.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-crank churn packed with crushed ice and rock salt, conventionally around three parts ice to one part rock salt. Any modern ice cream machine works. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours to break up the crystals.
- The lemon juice mattersTwo tablespoons in six cups looks trivial but it is doing the work of sharpening the raspberry, which flattens badly once frozen. Do not omit it.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a course ice or six as dessert.
Ices of this kind occupy a particular place in late nineteenth-century American dining: not dessert so much as a cold, sharp, dairy-free interruption served between the heavy courses of a formal dinner, the same role played by Roman punch in the same chapter. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) gives a long run of them built on one interchangeable formula, sugar syrup plus fruit juice plus a corrective squeeze of lemon, which is why so many entries here are a single line pointing back to another. Blood oranges reached the northern United States as a winter import from the Mediterranean, and the name "Pomegranate Ice" appears to refer to their colour rather than to any pomegranate content, a habit of fanciful naming common on menus of the period. That such a recipe could appear at all says something about the ice trade: cheap harvested ice and rock salt made freezing a routine domestic operation in New England kitchens decades before mechanical refrigeration.