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Raspberry Ice II
1 quart raspberries 1 cup sugar 1 cup water Lemon juice Sprinkle raspberries with sugar, cover, and let stand two hours. Mash, squeeze through cheese-cloth, add water and lemon juice to taste, then freeze. Raspberry ice prepared in this way retains the natural color of the fruit.
Strawberry Ice I 4 cups water 2 cups strawberry juice 1½ cups sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I.
A no-cook fruit ice from Fannie Farmer's chapter on frozen desserts, written for a hand-cranked churn packed in ice and salt. The method is sound; only the equipment needs translating.
- The point of the macerationSugaring the raspberries and leaving them covered for two hours draws the juice out cold, which the recipe says is why the finished ice retains the natural color of the fruit. The implied contrast is with Raspberry Ice I, which is not printed here.
- QuantitiesA quart of raspberries is roughly 1¼ lb. It yields somewhere near 1½ cups of strained juice, so with the water and sugar expect about 3 cups of finished ice, serving four to six.
- StrainingCheesecloth is still the right tool; press hard, then twist. A fine sieve works but leaves more seed grit. Do not press so hard that pulp goes through if you want a clean ice rather than a sorbet.
- Lemon juice "to taste"Start with 1 tablespoon for this quantity, the amount specified in the strawberry version printed alongside, and add more. It sharpens fruit that sugar has flattened.
- Sugar is not optional seasoningWith only fruit, sugar and water, the sugar controls texture as much as sweetness. Cut it much below a cup and the ice freezes into a solid block you cannot scoop.
- FreezingChill the mixture thoroughly, then run it in an ice cream machine for 20-25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita rather than the smooth ice a churn produces.
- RipeningThe original assumed the packed churn would sit in ice and salt afterward. Modern equivalent: transfer to a container and hold in the freezer an hour before serving, then let it stand a few minutes at room temperature to soften.
- The strawberry variationNote that the Strawberry Ice printed here follows Raspberry Ice I, not this one: the text says "Prepare and freeze same as Raspberry Ice I." Its 4 cups water to 2 cups juice makes a much leaner ice.
An "ice" in this book means water ice: fruit juice, sugar and water, with no dairy at all, as distinct from the ice creams and frozen custards that fill the rest of the chapter. Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook-Book gives several of them, including two raspberry recipes side by side, one cooked and one raw, with a plain note about which result to expect from each. Raspberries were a short-season market fruit in New England, and a recipe that preserves their color rather than cooking it away had obvious appeal for a summer table. The freezing itself depended on the ice trade: households bought block ice from a dealer, cracked it, layered it with rock salt around a canister and turned the crank.