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Emon Ice
Make a syrup by boiling one quart of water with one pint of sugar; add three-fourths cup of strained lemon juice. Freeze.
A plain water ice in the oldest style: sugar syrup, lemon juice, nothing else. The proportions are lean by modern standards, which affects both texture and how you freeze it.
- The title is a typographical slip"Emon Ice" is Lemon Ice with the L lost in setting the type. Nothing about the method is unusual for a lemon water ice of the period.
- A pint of sugar is a measure of volumeTwo cups of granulated sugar, roughly 14 ounces by weight. American cookbooks of this period commonly gave sugar in cups and pints rather than by weight.
- Chill the syrup completelyThis is the step the recipe leaves out and the one that matters. Boiled syrup added warm to a churn or freezer will not set properly, and the juice loses its brightness if it goes in hot. Cool the syrup, then stir in the juice, then chill again before freezing.
- How much lemonThree-quarters cup of strained juice is about four to six lemons depending on size. Strain it for real; pulp and membrane freeze into gritty threads.
- It will freeze hardTwo cups of sugar against not quite five cups of liquid is a lean sugar concentration for a water ice, so the finished mixture sets firm and coarse rather than scoopable. Churning in an ice-cream maker keeps the crystals fine; if you still-freeze it in a pan, break it up with a fork every 30 minutes or you get a solid block.
- "Freeze" meant a hand-cranked pailThe original assumes a wooden bucket with an inner canister, packed with cracked ice and coarse salt at about three parts ice to one part salt, cranked until stiff and then left to ripen under a blanket. Any modern churn does the same work.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half; eight to ten small servings, which is how a water ice was portioned when it appeared between courses rather than as dessert.
Water ices — sugar, water and fruit juice, with no dairy at all — were long established in American cookbooks, and lemon was among the commonest flavors. In the elaborate multi-course dinners of the late Victorian and Edwardian table, a lemon ice was often served midway through the meal as a palate cleanser, a role the French called the sorbet course. Recipes this simple also depended on the commercial ice trade: by the late nineteenth century, ice cut from northern lakes in winter and stored in insulated houses was delivered by wagon to city kitchens, which is what made a quart of frozen lemon syrup an ordinary thing to serve at home rather than a luxury of the wealthy.