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Cranberry Ice
Make a syrup of one quart of water and one and one-half pints of sugar. Boil one quart of cranberries in a little water, when soft, press through a sieve and strain again. Add to the syrup and freeze. Serve between courses at dinner.
A plain water ice with no eggs or cream, meant as a palate cleanser rather than a dessert. The measurements translate cleanly; the freezing method is the only part that assumes equipment most kitchens no longer have.
- The measurementsOne quart of water is 4 cups; one and one-half pints of sugar is 3 cups (about 21 oz by weight). A quart of cranberries is roughly 4 cups, or a pound — about a third more than one standard 12 oz supermarket bag.
- Make the syrup properlyBring the water and sugar to a boil and stir only until the sugar has dissolved, then let it boil a minute or two. Cool it completely before combining with the fruit purée; warm base put into a freezer canister will not churn.
- Cooking the berriesCranberries pop and soften in five to eight minutes in an inch of water. The recipe's double straining is worth doing — once through a sieve to hold back skins and seeds, once through fine mesh — because cranberry skin fragments read as grit in a smooth ice.
- Taste before you freezeCranberries vary in acidity and freezing dulls sweetness noticeably. The mixture should taste slightly too sweet and quite sharp at room temperature. A pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon sharpen it without adding sugar.
- Freezing without a hand-crank freezerThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. An ice-cream machine does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- It will freeze hardWith no fat, egg or alcohol, this sets much firmer than ice cream. Move it to the refrigerator for 10 to 15 minutes before serving so it can be scooped.
- Yield and serviceCloser to two quarts. As the between-courses ice the recipe intends, that is a dozen or more small servings, traditionally in stemmed glasses or hollowed lemon shells; as a dessert sorbet, fewer.
The instruction to "serve between courses at dinner" places this squarely in the formal service of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a small water ice — sometimes a rum- or wine-based Roman punch, sometimes simply "the ice" — was set down midway through a long meal to refresh the palate before the roast or game course. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, aimed its cook book at aspiring middle-class households, and the inclusion of an intermediate ice signals a table trying to keep up with the multi-course dinners of wealthier homes without the staff to support them. Cranberries suited the purpose and the American market: Vaccinium macrocarpon is native to the northeastern bogs, was under commercial cultivation on Cape Cod and in New Jersey through the nineteenth century, and keeps for months in cold storage, making it one of the few genuinely tart fruits available fresh in midwinter when the dinner-party season was at its height.