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Blueberry Ice
1 pint stewed blue-berries (already sweetened) 1/3 tablespoonful gelatine, soaked in half a cup of cold water berries (already tine, soaked in sweetened) half a cup of cold ½ cup sugar water cup lemon-juice 1 cup boiling water I beaten egg white Strain berries. (Juice should amount to one and one-half cups.) Melt soaked gelatine in boiling water, add sugar, blueberry, and lemon-juice. Cool and freeze. Stir in beaten egg white just before freezing.
A gelatine-set fruit ice from the era before home freezers, written for a hand-cranked churn. Two features of the method do not survive into a modern kitchen: the unheated egg white and the vagueness of the gelatine quantity.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is stirred into a cold mixture and then frozen; nothing in the process ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either. The gelatine is melted in boiling water separately, so the white itself is never heated. Use a current recipe if you want a fruit ice lightened with meringue.
- Gelatine, unspecifiedThe amount of gelatine is not given in the surviving text, only that it is soaked in half a cup of cold water. Gelatine was sold in both sheet and granulated form, and setting power differed between them, so there is no reliable modern equivalent to supply here.
- "Cool and freeze"For a recipe of this period this meant packing the mixture into the can of a crank freezer surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, and turning it until stiff. The gelatine would have helped keep the texture from setting hard, a job now handled by churning and by sugar content.
- Berry juiceThe instruction to strain the berries and reach one and a half cups of juice is stated plainly, as are the half cup of sugar and the cup of boiling water. Roughly a quart of blueberries, mashed with sugar and left to stand, yields about that much juice.
- YieldA mixture of this size — three cups of liquid or a little more before freezing — makes roughly a quart, or four small servings.
Fruit ices held together with gelatine were a standard of American household cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, when packaged granulated gelatine became cheap and every ambitious kitchen had a crank freezer. This one is a use for fruit already past its best: berries too soft to serve whole, or the sweetened juice left in the bottom of a dish of stewed fruit, strained clear and frozen so that nothing shows. Blueberries in particular were often bought or picked in quantity, and the domestic-science writers of the period treated the salvage of such fruit as a small moral duty rather than a matter of thrift alone.