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Apple Water Ice
Peel and core the required number of apples, cut them into quarters and place in a saucepan; set the pan over a fire and cook until tender. Pass them through a very fine sieve over a basin, rubbing as much through as possible and mix with water highly flavored with lemon. Pack the basin in ice, and when the mixture is frozen it is ready for use.
A water ice in the old sense: fruit purée, water, no dairy. Oscar assumes a cook who already knows the proportions and the freezing routine, so the recipe leaves out both the sugar and the salt.
- The missing sugarPeriod water ices were generally built on a sweetened syrup, and this one gives no quantity at all. Without sugar the mixture freezes into a solid apple-flavoured ice block rather than a scrapeable ice; figure on a syrup of roughly equal parts sugar and water making up the liquid, adjusted to taste before freezing.
- Proportions to aim forAbout 2 cups of sieved apple pulp to 2 cups of liquid gives a texture that holds together. Thinner than that and it turns glassy; thicker and it sets stiff and pasty.
- "Pack the basin in ice"Plain crushed ice will not go below 32F and the mixture will never freeze. The period practice, understood but unstated here, is ice mixed with coarse salt at roughly three parts ice to one of salt, which drops the bath well below freezing.
- Freeze with agitationLeft undisturbed, the basin produces coarse crystals. Stir and scrape the mixture down from the sides every twenty minutes or so as it sets, or run it through an ice cream machine, which is doing the same job of the old crank freezer.
- Cooking the applesAdd a splash of water to the pan so the quarters steam rather than scorch, and keep the lid on. Tart cooking apples give more character than sweet eating varieties, whose flavour disappears once frozen.
- "Highly flavored with lemon"Freezing dulls both acid and aroma noticeably, so the mixture should taste aggressively lemony and slightly too sweet at room temperature. Judge it cold if you can, by chilling a spoonful first.
- SievingA fine sieve and a wooden spoon or ladle does the work described; a food mill fitted with the fine plate is faster. Skip the blender, which whips air into the pulp and leaves it foamy.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of apples with the syrup above makes about a quart, enough for six small glasses. Water ices were served in stemmed glasses between courses or after fish, in far smaller portions than a modern scoop of sorbet.