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Grape Ice
⅔ cup sugar
1½ cup water
1 cup grape-juice
2 tablespoons lemon-juice
¼ cup orange-juice
Boil the sugar and water together for five minutes. Mix all the ingredients together, strain and freeze.
A water ice of the plainest sort: sugar syrup, fruit juice, and a churn. Everything depends on the sugar-to-liquid ratio, which is already correct as written, and on how you freeze it.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of liquid, which freezes to roughly a pint of ice — four small servings. Doubling is safe; the syrup proportion scales directly.
- What grape-juice meantMost likely unsweetened grape juice, either home-pressed or the bottled Concord juice that was commercially available from the 1890s onward. Use 100 percent juice, not a grape drink or cocktail, or the ice will be cloyingly sweet and freeze soft.
- The five-minute boilThis is not decoration. Boiling dissolves the sugar completely and thickens the syrup a little; it is the sugar in the mixture that keeps the finished ice scoopable instead of a solid block. Boil it in a small pan, uncovered, and let it cool before adding the juices.
- Strain, then chillStraining catches citrus pulp and any grape sediment. Chill the mixture thoroughly in the refrigerator before it goes into the freezer; a warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture.
- "Freeze" in 1910"Freeze" in a book of this period -- A hand-crank freezer packed with roughly one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice, cranked until stiff. An ice-cream machine does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes.
- Without a machinePour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours. The result is closer to a granita than the smooth ice a churn produces.
- RipeningWater ices are best after an hour or two packed down in the freezer to firm up, and they are at their best the day they are made. After a day or two the citrus fades and the texture coarsens.
- ServingSmall portions, in chilled glasses. In a book of this period a grape ice would appear either as a dessert or as the palate-clearing course partway through a long dinner.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar syrup, and nothing else — are often said to be the older and cheaper half of the frozen-dessert repertoire. Grape ice in particular belongs to a specific American moment: bottled unfermented grape juice became a national grocery item in the late nineteenth century, promoted heavily as a temperance beverage, and cookbooks quickly absorbed it into punches, jellies, and ices. The lemon and orange here are doing structural work as much as flavoring — Concord grape is sweet and one-dimensional on its own, and the citrus acid gives the ice a sharpness it would otherwise lack. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the household market, printed exactly this kind of recipe: no equipment beyond a freezer pail, no expensive ingredient, and a result that could be set before guests without apology.