Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Water (Cups sugar Drain apricots)
Water (Cups sugar Drain apricots)
1 can apricots. 1½ cups sugar Drain apricots, and cut in small pieces. To the syrup add enough water to make four cups, and cook with sugar five minutes; strain, add apricots, cool, and freeze. Peaches may be used instead of apricots. To make a richer dessert, add the whip from two cups cream when frozen to a mush, and continue freezing. 2 cups water 1 cup sugar
This entry has come down to us garbled — the ingredient lines have been jumbled into the middle and end of the paragraph — but it is a straightforward canned-apricot water ice, and the method is intact.
- Reading the ingredientsThe recipe wants a can of apricots in syrup, 1½ cups sugar, and water. The stray "2 cups water 1 cup sugar" at the end appears to belong to a neighbouring recipe or to a headnote proportion for plain syrup; ignore it and follow the instruction in the paragraph, which is to top the drained syrup up to four cups with water.
- The apricotsA period can of apricots would have held on the order of a pint or so of fruit in heavy syrup, though sizes varied. A modern 15-oz can of apricot halves in syrup, drained, is the right order of magnitude; if you use fruit in juice or light syrup, expect to want the full 1½ cups sugar rather than less.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessIn a water ice the sugar keeps the mixture from freezing into a solid block. Do not reduce it much below the stated amount or you will get an apricot-flavoured brick. The mixture should taste distinctly too sweet at room temperature; cold blunts sweetness sharply.
- "Freeze to a mush"This is the stage where the mixture is thick and slushy but not set — in a modern churn, five to ten minutes before the end. That is the moment to fold in the whipped cream if you want the richer version.
- "The whip from two cups cream"Nineteenth-century cooks whipped cream in a bowl set over ice and skimmed the stiff froth off the top as it formed, returning or discarding the thin liquid beneath. With modern heavy cream you simply whip it to soft peaks; rather less than two cups will give a comparable volume of froth, since none of it is skimmed off and set aside.
- Freezing without a churnThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Failing an ice-cream machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break the mixture up thoroughly with a fork every 30 minutes until it is uniformly granular — closer to a granita, but the correct family of dessert.
- Strain, then coolStrain the syrup while hot to catch any scum, then chill it completely before churning. A warm mixture in the freezer produces coarse crystals.
- YieldFour cups of syrup plus the dissolved sugar and the fruit makes appreciably more than a quart; expect around a quart and a half plain, and more again with the cream folded in.
Water ices — fruit juice or syrup frozen without dairy — were the plainest and cheapest of the frozen desserts in Fannie Farmer's chapter, and canned fruit made them a year-round proposition in a way fresh apricots never could be in New England. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896, at the height of the American commercial canning industry's expansion, and Farmer treats canned peaches, apricots and pineapple as ordinary pantry stock; the heavy syrup they were packed in was itself an ingredient, not something to be poured down the drain. Home freezing at this date still depended on the ice trade: blocks cut from northern ponds in winter, stored in insulated ice houses, and delivered by wagon, then crushed and layered with rock salt around a crank freezer's canister. The instruction to add whipped cream "when frozen to a mush" reflects a tidy period logic — the same base could be served as a lean ice or, with cream, as something richer.