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Strawberry Water Ice
Pick one and one-half pounds of strawberries, put them into a basin with a little sifted crushed loaf sugar and the juice of a lemon, pass the whole through a fine hair-sieve into another basin, stir in three teacupfuls of syrup and a few drops of cochineal to color, turn the preparation into the freezer, work it thoroughly, and it is then ready for use.
A sorbet in all but name: fruit purée, lemon, sugar syrup, no dairy. The only real obstacles are the sugar and the equipment, both of which have modern equivalents.
- Loaf sugar, crushed and siftedLoaf sugar came as a hard refined cone that had to be broken up and sieved before use. Superfine (caster) sugar is the direct replacement; the recipe says only "a little," and a couple of tablespoons is enough, since its job here is mainly to draw juice from the berries.
- The syrup is the recipe"Three teacupfuls of syrup" means a pre-made sugar syrup, boiled and cooled, not corn syrup or maple. Ice syrups were commonly made around equal weights of sugar and water boiled until clear, and it is the syrup that governs the texture here. A period teacupful is variously reckoned at 4 to 6 fl oz, so the three cupfuls come to somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 1/4 cups of syrup — in any case enough to make the finished mixture noticeably sweeter than the fruit alone.
- Sweetness is structuralSugar depresses the freezing point and keeps a water ice scoopable. Cut the syrup sharply and you should expect a much harder, icier set. If you want it less sweet, hold back a little syrup and add water instead, and expect a firmer result.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair; the usual explanation is that metal discoloured acidic fruit, and fine wire mesh was in any case less common. Any fine nylon or stainless mesh strainer does the same work; press the pulp through with a ladle and discard the seeds.
- CochinealCarmine, made from scale insects, and still sold as a food colouring under that name or E120. It is optional — strawberries strained free of skins do go pale, but the colour is cosmetic. Note it is an animal product if that matters to your table.
- "Turn into the freezer"The freezer is a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, not a modern appliance. An ice cream machine handles it directly; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- Work it thoroughlyThis is the hinge. A water ice with no fat or egg to soften it depends entirely on constant agitation to keep ice crystals small. Undercranked, it turns granular within the hour.
- Yield and servingSomething over a quart, serving six or so. Best eaten within a day; after longer storage it will have set hard and needs a spell at room temperature before scooping.
Water ices reached American hotel kitchens by way of France and Italy, where sorbetto and glace à l'eau were long distinguished from the cream ices by containing no dairy at all — fruit, sugar syrup, and often a squeeze of lemon to sharpen it. At the Waldorf in the 1890s an ice like this would have arrived mid-meal as much as at the end, a palate cleanser between heavy courses, which is why the recipe is brief and the flavouring plain. The dependence on a pre-made stock syrup is the mark of a professional kitchen rather than a domestic one. The cochineal is equally of its time — insect-derived carmine was a reliable red, useful for giving strained fruit back the colour the sieve had taken away.