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Raspberry and Currant Ice
Prepare the fruit as directed for fresh fruit ice creams. Make a syrup of one and onehalf cups of sugar and one-fourth quart of water. Less sugar is needed as the fruit has previously been sprinkled with it. Add to this syrup one and one-half cups of currant juice and three-fourths cup of raspberry juice.
A water ice, not a cream — the recipe assumes you have already read the book's instructions for fresh fruit ice creams, where the fruit is crushed, sprinkled with sugar, left to stand and then strained. A few points fill in what the original leaves implied.
- One-fourth quartThat is one cup of water; the original states the measure as a fraction of a quart, so convert on sight rather than reaching for a quart jug.
- Getting the juiceCrush the berries and currants, sprinkle with sugar (a few tablespoons per pint is enough), and let them stand half an hour or more before straining through a jelly bag or fine sieve. The sugar draws the juice out; pressing hard gives cloudy, pulpy juice.
- The syrupDissolve the 1½ cups sugar in the cup of water over heat, bring just to a boil to clear it, then cool completely before adding the juice. Adding cold juice to hot syrup drives off the fresh fruit flavor that is the whole point of the dish.
- CurrantsRed currants, not dried Zante currants. Fresh currants are a short-season market item now; frozen red currants or bottled unsweetened currant juice both work, and the sharp acidity is what keeps the raspberry from tasting flat.
- Sweetness checkBecause the fruit has already been sugared, the finished mixture is variable. Taste it before freezing — it should be distinctly sweeter than you want the ice to be, since freezing mutes sweetness noticeably.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, churn 20–25 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- YieldRoughly a quart, serving six to eight in the small portions usual for an ice.
Water ices built on fruit juice and sugar syrup were the plain, cheap end of the frozen-dessert range in American cookbooks around 1900, and the Butterick book — issued by a pattern company selling to home dressmakers and housekeepers rather than to professional cooks — groups them with the creams so a reader could choose according to what the dairy and the garden allowed. Currants earn their place here for flavor and for the acid they carry, which gives a currant-heavy ice a brighter taste. Red currant bushes were a common back-garden fixture in the northern states and Britain at the time; their near-disappearance from American markets is generally traced to early twentieth-century state bans on Ribes plants, which host white pine blister rust, and the fruit has never fully returned to grocery shelves.