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Strawberry Ice II
1 quart box strawberries 1 cup sugar Make same as Raspberry Ice II. 4 cups water 1 cup water Lemon juice
The ingredient list has been flattened out of its original two columns, which is why the water appears twice and no method is given. Read it as: fruit and sugar, a syrup made from 1 cup water, then 4 cups water to thin, with lemon juice to sharpen.
- How to read the listThe 1 cup of water is most likely the syrup water, boiled with the sugar, with the 4 cups added after the fruit is strained; the page itself does not say so, and the method has to be taken from Raspberry Ice II.
- A quart box of strawberriesA market box of the period holds roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, which is about 3 to 4 cups hulled. Crush them with the sugar syrup and let them stand before straining, so the sugar draws out the juice.
- Lemon juice, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. Strawberries are less sharp than the raspberries of the companion recipe and the ice can taste flat without it; something in the order of the juice of one lemon, added to taste before freezing.
- StrainingPress the pulp through a fine sieve rather than a cloth if you want body. Strawberry seeds are small enough to be unpleasant in a smooth ice, so do not skip the sieve altogether.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessOne cup to five cups of liquid is what keeps the ice scrapable rather than a solid block. Cutting the sugar substantially will give you something closer to flavoured ice cubes.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first and churn 20 to 25 minutes; without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight; the recipe itself states no yield.
Water ices occupy their own territory in late nineteenth-century American cookery: no dairy, no eggs, simply fruit, sugar syrup and water frozen with agitation. The cookbooks of the period give dozens of them, and the fact that this strawberry version is a bare cross-reference to the raspberry one shows how standardised the formula had become -- once a cook knew the ratio, any soft fruit could be swapped in. Ices had a place in formal dinner service as a palate cleanser, a French convention. Their appearance in a household cookbook rather than a professional confectioner's manual reflects the spread of the domestic ice-cream freezer and of the commercial ice trade, which by this period put a reliable supply of block ice and rock salt within reach of ordinary town kitchens in summer.