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Red Cherry Water Ice
Wash one quart of sweet red or black cherries, pound them so as to break the stones, and pass the juice through a strainer into a freezer. Boil the cherry-pulp with some of the sugar and water, in order to extract the flavor from the kernels, and pass that also through the strainer. Add the other pint of water and the remainder of the sugar to the amount of three-quarters of a pound and freeze. Do not use the whites of eggs in this ice, as the color is not good unless frozen naturally. This makes a nice ice for the third color in a Neapolitan.
The frozen part of this is unremarkable — fruit juice, sugar syrup, water, churned. The problem is the step Oscar treats as the whole point of the method: deliberately crushing the stones and simmering the broken kernels to draw their flavor into the syrup.
- Why the kernels are the problemCherry stones contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Crushing the kernel brings the glycoside into contact with the enzyme that splits it, and the product is hydrogen cyanide. The almond-like perfume the recipe is chasing comes from benzaldehyde released by exactly the same reaction.
- No way to judge the doseA quart of cherries carries on the order of a hundred stones, and the recipe gives no guidance on how many are broken, how finely, how long the pulp simmers, or how much of the extract goes into the finished ice. Cyanide yield per kernel varies with variety and ripeness, so there is no quantity here that can be called within range.
- Boiling is not a safeguardHydrogen cyanide is volatile and some is driven off in an open pan, but boiling also accelerates the enzymatic and acid breakdown of amygdalin, and whatever cyanide stays dissolved in a sugar syrup goes into the freezer with it. The finished ice is served cold and unheated.
- The instruction that cannot be fixed by scalingThere is no version of "pound them so as to break the stones" that is safe at kitchen precision. A current cherry sorbet recipe pits the fruit and, if almond flavor is wanted, uses almond extract; use one of those instead.
- Incomplete quantities in any caseThe text says to add "the other pint of water" and sugar "to the amount of three-quarters of a pound" without stating how much sugar went into the pulp; the first quantity of water is only implied by "the other pint." The brevity suggests a kitchen where the syrup ratio was assumed knowledge rather than a reader working from the page alone.
- On the egg-white noteThe remark is sound as history: whipped white was commonly beaten into water ices to lighten the texture and check large ice crystals in a hand-cranked freezer. Oscar rejects it here because it clouds the clear red he wants for the third stripe of a Neapolitan.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar and water with no dairy — were the lighter half of the nineteenth-century frozen repertoire, and a Neapolitan meant a molded brick of three contrasting layers turned out and sliced, which is why this entry is judged first on color and only then on flavor. The trick of bruising the stones is older than the ice itself: European confectioners and distillers had long used cherry, peach and apricot kernels as a cheap source of the almond-bitter note sold as noyau, and cookbooks of Oscar Tschirky's era repeat the practice without comment. Oscar, the celebrated maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, compiled this book in 1896 as a record of a working hotel kitchen, and the brevity here — "some of the sugar and water" — reflects a text written for cooks who already knew the standard syrup by heart.