Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Raspberry Water Ice
Raspberry Water Ice
Place in a basin one-half pound of powdered sugar, squeeze in the juice of three lemons, and add one pint of picked and well-cleaned raspberries. Beat briskly with a spatula for five minutes, add one quart of cold water, mixing again for a minute or two, and strain through a sieve into the freezer. Put on the lid and lay the freezer in an ice-tub, filling it all round with broken ice, mixed with a small quantity of rock salt. Turn the handle on the cover as rapidly as possible for three minutes. Raise the lid, and with a spoon detach the cream from all round the freezer and the bottom also. Remove it, and turn the handle again sharply for three minutes more. Uncover and detach the cream as before, taking care that no salt or ice drops in it. Place the lid on, and repeat the operation three times more. By this time the cream should be quite firm, turn it out onto a cold dish, over which has been spread a napkin, and serve.
A water ice, not a cream — there is no dairy here despite Oscar's habit of calling the frozen mass "the cream." The whole method is a hand-cranked churn packed in ice and salt, which converts easily to a modern machine or to a still-frozen granita.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use plain granulated: half a pound is a generous 1 cup (about 1⅛ cups).
- "The freezer"The freezer is the metal canister of a crank churn, set inside a wooden ice-tub. Modern equivalent: the bowl of an ice cream maker, churned about 20–25 minutes, or a shallow metal pan in the deep freeze.
- Ice and rock saltSalt lowers the melting point of the surrounding ice so the brine drops well below freezing. Oscar's warning about salt dropping into the mixture is worth heeding — stray grains spoil the flavour of the batch and make it slower to set.
- The scrapingDetaching the frozen film from the sides and bottom every three minutes is what keeps the crystals small. If you still-freeze this in a pan, do the same thing with a fork every 20–30 minutes for about three hours; the result will be a granita texture rather than a smooth ice.
- StrainingPushing the macerated berries through a sieve removes the seeds and is worth doing thoroughly — press hard with the back of a ladle rather than letting it drip, or you lose most of the pulp.
- Sugar balanceHalf a pound of sugar to a quart of water plus three lemons is on the tart, lean side, and a lean syrup freezes hard. Let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before serving, or it will be difficult to spoon.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, serving six to eight in small glasses. Serve it in chilled coupes; the napkin spread over a cold dish is a period presentation detail.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar and water frozen without dairy — reached American hotel dining rooms by way of French and Italian confectionery, where comparable preparations were called sorbet or sorbetto. In hotel dining they served two purposes: as a light dessert, and as the palate-cleansing course set into the middle of a long menu, a convention that survives in the modern sorbet intermezzo. Oscar Tschirky's book dates from the years when mechanical refrigeration was arriving but had not yet displaced the ice trade; harvested natural ice was still bought by the block and freezers were still cranked by hand, which is the context for the instructions about salt, timing and scraping. Raspberries, highly perishable and briefly in season, made this a summer dish.