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Peach Water Ice
Slice ten ripe peaches but do not peel them, boil till soft in one-half pint of water, then rub them through a fine hair-sieve. Mix with the pulp one pint of syrup, the strained juice of one lemon, three or four drops of oil of almonds, and color it with a little carmine or cochineal. Put the preparation in the freezer, turn it till frozen, then fill a plain mould with it, put the lid on and pack it in ice. When ready to serve, turn the contents of the mould onto a fancy dish.
A straightforward fruit ice built on a cooked peach purée and a sugar syrup, written for a hand-crank freezer and a salt-and-ice packing tub. The proportions still work; the equipment and one of the flavorings need translating.
- Oil of almondsIn 1896 this meant oil of bitter almonds, the source of the marzipan note in ices and blancmanges. Buy only a food-grade bitter almond extract or flavoring labelled free from prussic acid; the bitter almond essential oil sold for perfumery and aromatherapy is not rectified, contains hydrogen cyanide, and must never be eaten. Three or four drops of a food extract is right for this volume, and the dish is perfectly good without it.
- One pint of syrupThe recipe assumes a stock syrup kept in the kitchen, sugar boiled with water until clear. Roughly equal volumes, about 2 cups sugar to 2 cups water, is a reasonable modern reading, though period syrups for ices were often heavier in sugar than that. Sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable rather than a solid block, so do not cut it far below this without expecting to chip at the mould.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, generally preferred because metal sieves could react with acid fruit and discolour it. A nylon mesh strainer or the fine plate of a food mill does the same job. The peaches go in unpeeled and the skins are strained out here; the recipe does not say why they are left on.
- Carmine or cochinealTwo closely related reds from the same insect source: cochineal as an extract, carmine as the pigment made from it. Carmine is still sold as a food coloring. It is optional, and anyone avoiding insect-derived additives can leave it out.
- "Put it in the freezer, turn it till frozen"The freezer is a churn: an inner canister set in a bucket packed with crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked until the ice thickens. A modern ice cream machine does this in 20 to 30 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- Moulding and packingThe churned ice is soft, so it is packed into a mould and returned to salt and ice to firm and "ripen" for an hour or two. A loaf pan or metal bowl in the freezer for two hours does the same. To unmould, dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert.
- YieldTen peaches and a pint of syrup make roughly 1.5 quarts, or eight to ten small servings. Water ices were served in small portions, and this one is very sweet.
Water ices were a fixture of grand-hotel service in Oscar Tschirky's day, appearing not only as dessert but partway through a long dinner, where a sharp, unmilked ice was thought to settle the palate before the roast. Oscar, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and its public face for decades, put his name to this book; the instructions assume a salt-and-ice packing tub and a shelf of fancy moulds. Peaches were a natural choice for an American summer ice: mid-Atlantic orchards in Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey shipped heavily by rail in the later nineteenth century, though the Delaware crop was already falling away by the 1890s. The almond flavoring is an old pairing rather than a stray idea, since peach kernels and bitter almonds yield the same aromatic compound, and stone-fruit dishes were long reinforced with a trace of it.