Home › Ice-Creams and Frozen Desserts › Cider Frappé
Cider Frappé
1½ cups sugar
2 cups orange-juice
1 pint water
½ cup lemon-juice
1 quart sweet cider
Boil sugar and water together for five minutes. Add cider and fruit-juices. Cool, strain and freeze to a mush.
A simple sugar-syrup sorbet base that needs almost no translation, though two terms in it mean something different now than they did in 1911.
- Sweet ciderIn American usage of the period this means fresh unfermented apple juice, as opposed to hard cider. Use cloudy, unsweetened apple cider from the refrigerated case; clear filtered apple juice works but tastes thinner.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups and a quart 4 cups, so the finished mixture is about 9 cups before freezing. That serves 10 to 12 as a frappé.
- The syrupFive minutes at a boil dissolves the sugar and drives off a little water, giving a syrup dense enough to keep the ice soft. Do not let it colour; you want no caramel flavour here.
- Add the juice off the heatCool the syrup somewhat before combining, and chill the whole mixture thoroughly before it goes into the freezer. Heat dulls fresh citrus, and a warm mix churns into coarse crystals.
- "Freeze to a mush"A frappé is deliberately stopped short of a firm sorbet: granular, spoonable, closer to a slush than a scoop. In a machine, churn only until it mounds; in a shallow metal pan in the freezer, rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for 3 to 4 hours.
- If you use a hand-crank freezerThe original assumes a bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. The mixture contains no dairy or egg, so it freezes hard and fast at the sides -- scrape them in as you turn.
- ServingServe in chilled glasses at once; a frappé collapses within minutes at room temperature. In books of this era it sometimes appears mid-meal as a palate cleanser as well as at the end of a meal.
Frappé, from the French frapper, to strike or chill, arrived in American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century as a name for anything frozen only to a slush -- the same idea Italians call granita. Its place in a 1911 household manual is a sign of how far domestic ice-making had come: apple cider was a cheap autumn commodity in the United States, oranges and lemons had become reliably available by rail and steamer, and the hand-crank freezer with its bucket of ice and rock salt is often said to have been common in middle-class kitchens. The recipe's language also sits within the temperance climate of the period, when "sweet cider" was carefully distinguished from the hard cider that had been the ordinary American farm drink for two centuries.