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Strawberry Ice
Mash two quarts of strawberries with two pounds of sugar; let . stand an hour or more, squeeze in a straining cloth, pressing out all the juice; add an equal measure of water; and when half frozen, add the beaten whites of eggs in the proportion of three eggs to a quart.-R. L. C., Baltimore, Md.
A straightforward fruit ice, except for the finish: raw egg whites are beaten into the half-frozen mixture and never heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe beaten whites go into a cold, sugary fruit base and are served without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not destroy the organism; it simply holds it. At three whites to the quart of finished ice, this is a substantial amount of raw egg per serving, and the mixture then sits in the freezer for hours or days. A current recipe using pasteurized whites should be used instead.
- What the whites were forBeaten egg white was one common way, before commercial stabilizers, to keep a water ice from setting into a solid block of pink ice. It adds air and protein that interrupt crystal growth, which is consistent with its being added at the halfway point rather than at the start.
- "An equal measure of water"Read as equal to the strained juice, not to the original two quarts of fruit. The recipe gives no yield; two quarts of berries pressed with two pounds of sugar might give something on the order of a quart of sweetened juice, which would put the finished ice in the region of two quarts.
- Sugar loadTwo pounds of sugar to two quarts of berries is heavy by modern taste, but it does double duty: it draws the juice out during the hour of standing, and it lowers the freezing point so the ice stays scoopable.
- "Half frozen"At the time this meant a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, and the stage at which the mixture has thickened to slush but still moves under the dasher. The recipe assumes a churn, not a still-frozen tray.
- Straining clothA doubled square of cheesecloth or a jelly bag. Pressing hard, as instructed, gives more yield but also more pulp and haze than a modern cook may want; letting it drip gives a clearer ice.
The distinction between an ice and an ice-cream is generally drawn in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, though usage of ice, water ice and sherbet overlapped freely: ices were fruit juice, sugar and water, with no dairy at all, and were often served between courses or as a light finish in hot weather. The Dixie Cook-Book gathered contributions from correspondents across the South and the border states, and the initials-and-city attribution here — R. L. C. of Baltimore — is said to be typical of how such compilations were assembled from readers' own household books. Strawberries appear constantly in these ice chapters, perhaps because they came in early and in quantity, and because a household with an ice house or a regular ice delivery could turn a glut of soft fruit into something that kept.