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Lemon Granite Ice
Mix one pint of filtered lemon-juice with three pints of syrup at twenty-eight degrees and freeze it into icicles in a freezing-pot. The granite should be served in small glasses.
A professional shorthand recipe: Oscar assumes a pastry cook who owns a saccharometer and a packing freezer. Two things need translating before it works at home — the syrup density and the freezing method.
- Syrup at 28 degreesThat is 28 degrees Baume, read on a hydrometer floated in cold syrup, and it works out to roughly 50 percent sugar by weight — equal weights of sugar and water, dissolved and thoroughly chilled. Do not read it as a temperature.
- VolumesOne pint of lemon juice takes roughly a dozen lemons, depending on size. With three pints of syrup the batch is two quarts; how many of the small glasses that fills depends on their size, but at three or four ounces apiece it is well over a dozen.
- It is sweet by design, and slow to setAt this ratio the finished mixture carries around 40 percent sugar, well above the 25 to 30 percent of a modern sorbet. High sugar depresses the freezing point, so the mix stays slushy rather than hardening -- which is what makes a granite scrapable. If you want a firmer, sharper ice, replace some of the syrup with water and taste as you go.
- "Filtered" lemon-juiceStrain it through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth. Pulp and shreds of membrane read as grit once the ice is frozen, and the point of a granite is a clean crystal on the tongue.
- The freezing-potA metal canister packed in crushed ice and coarse salt, worked by hand. The modern equivalent is a shallow metal pan in the freezer, raked with a fork every 30 minutes for three to four hours until the whole is loose coarse crystals. A churning ice cream machine gives a smooth sorbet, not a granite.
- "Freeze it into icicles"This is the hinge of the recipe. The texture wanted is separate needle-like crystals, so scrape rather than stir, and stop while the crystals are still distinct — worked too long the mass compacts into a solid block.
- ServingChill the small glasses first and serve at once. A granite at this sugar level slumps within a few minutes at room temperature.
A granite (French granité) sat in the classic French menu as a palate-cleanser between the heavy courses rather than as a dessert, which may be why Oscar Tschirky specifies small glasses and gives no garnish. The recipe's real period marker is the phrase "syrup at twenty-eight degrees": the Baume hydrometer was standard equipment in a professional pastry department around 1896, when The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf appeared, and densities were quoted as numbers a cook could verify rather than as cups of sugar. Hotel kitchens of the period packed their freezing-pots with block ice and rock salt.