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Vanilla Water Ice
Pound sufficient vanilla beans in a mortar to flavor one quart of water. Pour that quantity of water into a saucepan with the pounded vanilla and one-half pound of loaf sugar. Boil the ingredients together, then strain the mixture through a fine hair-sieve; squeeze in the juice of one lemon, put it in the freezing-pot, and freeze.
A plain water ice — sugar syrup, vanilla, lemon, no dairy — from the era when every kitchen had a hand-cranked freezing pail. Two things matter: the syrup is lean, and the vanilla is pounded rather than split.
- "Sufficient vanilla beans"For a quart of water, two to three whole beans give a clear vanilla flavour; four makes it assertive. Pounding the whole bean in a mortar, pod and all, extracts more than splitting and scraping, and the seeds are strained out later anyway.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar, sold in hard cones or cut lumps and broken up before weighing. Granulated sugar is effectively the same thing; half a pound is a generous cup.
- Boil, then check the volumeBoiling a quart down with the lid off can cost you a cup of water and throw the sugar balance off. Cover the pan, boil briefly, and top back up to a quart after straining.
- Hair-sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the fine strainer of the period. A fine-mesh sieve lined with a doubled layer of cheesecloth catches the vanilla seeds and any pod fibre.
- Freezing-potA tinned or pewter canister set in a wooden pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, turned and scraped by hand. An ice cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break the mass up with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Chill before freezingRefrigerate the strained syrup until cold before it goes into the pot; a warm mix melts the ice around it and freezes with larger crystals.
- LemonOne lemon in a quart is seasoning, not flavour: the acid sharpens the vanilla and keeps the ice from tasting flatly sweet. Add it after straining, off the heat, as written.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six as a small course or four as dessert. Best eaten the day it is made; it sets rock-hard overnight.
Water ices — sugar, water, flavouring, no cream — were the older and cheaper branch of frozen confectionery, and by the 1890s a hotel like the Waldorf served them both as desserts and as a sorbet course to reset the palate. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the 1896 Cook Book, was cataloguing the working repertoire of a large commercial kitchen, which is why the instructions assume equipment nobody itemises: a mortar, a hair-sieve, a freezing-pot buried in ice and salt. The ice itself came from the winter harvest on northern lakes and rivers, cut, stored in insulated houses and shipped south — a trade that made commercial ice cream and ices possible in American cities decades before mechanical refrigeration was common. Vanilla in this period meant cured beans, usually from Mexico or the Indian Ocean islands, and expensive enough that a recipe telling you to pound in "sufficient" beans was making a real demand.