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Pear Water Ice
Peel a few ripe pears and grate them into a basin; mix with them eight ounces of powdered sugar, the strained juice of two oranges and one lemon, a little of the peel and two tablespoonfuls of vanilla sugar. Leave it for half an hour, then pass the preparation through a fine hair-sieve, mix a little cold water with it and freeze it in the ice box. When firm take the ice up with a large spoon and pile it like a pyramid on a folded napkin. Put some little fancy cakes round the dish, and serve.
A straightforward fruit ice, but written for a kitchen with an ice-and-salt freezer and a different vocabulary of sugars. Two things need translating: the sugar and the freezing.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this period powdered sugar meant granulated sugar ground fine — what is now sold as caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which will cloud the ice and dull the flavour. Eight ounces is about 1 1/8 cups by weight.
- Quantity of pears"A few ripe pears" is genuinely open. For the stated sugar and citrus, four to five medium ripe pears (about 1 1/2 lb, yielding roughly 2 cups of pulp and juice) gives a balanced mixture. Bartlett or Comice, fully ripe and fragrant, are the right sort.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessIn a water ice the sugar controls texture. Cut it back and the result freezes into a solid block rather than a scrapeable ice. If the pears are very sweet, adjust with extra lemon rather than by removing sugar.
- Work quickly with the grated fruitGrated pear browns within minutes. Grate directly into the citrus juice rather than resting the fruit before mixing, and the acid will keep the half-hour maceration from discolouring much.
- Vanilla sugarTwo tablespoons of vanilla sugar — granulated sugar stored with a split vanilla pod — was a standard pantry item. A teaspoon of vanilla extract plus two tablespoons of sugar is the practical substitute, though the extract reads slightly sharper.
- Hair sieveA fine-meshed sieve of woven horsehair, used for straining without metallic taint. Any fine nylon or stainless sieve does the job; press the pulp firmly, leaving the gritty cells behind.
- "Freeze it in the ice box"This means a freezing pail or pot packed with ice and rock salt, very likely the hand-cranked sort that churns as it freezes, though the recipe does not say so. A modern ice cream machine gives a comparable result in 20-30 minutes. Frozen undisturbed in a household freezer the mixture will set hard and grainy; if you have no machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- The napkin is functionalA folded napkin under the mound of ice absorbs meltwater at the table so the dish does not swim. Chill the serving dish first.
- YieldAbout one quart — four to six portions served as a between-course refresher, or four as a dessert with the little cakes.
Water ices — glaces à l'eau in the French kitchen vocabulary that ran American hotel cooking at the turn of the century — were fruit purée, sugar and citrus with no dairy at all, and they served a specific structural purpose in a long menu: a cold, acidic pause partway through the meal, or a light close after a heavy one. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, was not himself a cook, but the book collects the kitchen's working repertoire. Pear is one of the quieter members of the family; unlike lemon or raspberry it has almost no acidity of its own, which is why the recipe borrows two oranges and a lemon to give the ice a spine. The instruction to pile it on a folded napkin and ring the dish with small cakes reflects the service style of the period, when a water ice arrived built rather than scooped.