No. 3602

Fresh Fruit Water Ices

Glaces a l'Eau aux Fruits Frais

Por Peaches, Apricots, Nectarines.-Select good fresh plucked fruits, yet not too ripe; split open, suppress the stalks, pith and skins; cut up finely and bestrew with vanilla sugar to hinder from blackening, then strain through a fine sieve. Put the pulp in a vessel and mix in a pint of thirty-two degree syrup for each quart, the juice of two oranges and four lemons and a bit of orange peel. Strain this preparation through a silk sieve and freeze it. As soon as the ice congeals remove with a spoon and place in a small, long freezer packed in ice; work it vigorously for ten minutes, incorporating slowly a pint of Italian meringue (No. 140) for each quart of syrup, and half a gill of kirsch or noyau; work it again ten minutes to have it smooth.

For Cherries, Pomegranates, Currants and Barberries.-A pint of fruit pulp for one quart of syrup and one gill or the juice of three lemons. If with cherries, crack the pips to extract and crush the meat and make the syrup of twenty degrees strength. For currants use the juice of two lemons; color with vegetal red, strain through a silk sieve and freeze.

← No. 3601 Water Ices-How to Prepare and Finish Them Molded Ices & Large Pieces No. 3603 Guanabana, Melon, Medlar, Pear or Plum Water →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer is writing for a professional pastry department with a saccharometer, a hand-cranked sorbetière and a stock of prepared syrups. Most of the instructions translate cleanly; one does not.

The cherry variant is the problemCracking the pips "to extract and crush the meat" puts raw cherry kernels into an unheated mixture. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which hydrolyzes to hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed in the presence of moisture, and the recipe gives no quantity and no cooking step to drive it off. Use a current recipe for cherry ice; the same objection applies to noyau made at home from kernels rather than bought as a commercial liqueur.
Vegetal redThe coloring for the currant ice belongs to an era before dye regulation. Reds sold to nineteenth-century kitchens ranged from plant extracts and cochineal (in fact an insect dye) to aniline and coal-tar compounds, and adulteration was common; nothing sold under that name is a known quantity today.
Degrees of syrup"Thirty-two degree" and "twenty degree" are Baume readings taken with a syrup hydrometer. Thirty-two is the classic heavy pastry syrup, in the region of 60 percent sugar by weight; twenty is a lighter syrup, somewhere around 35 percent. Without a hydrometer or refractometer the exact figures cannot be reconstructed from the text, and the ratios matter because sugar concentration sets how hard the ice freezes.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of kirsch is two fluid ounces (four tablespoons) and one gill of lemon juice is four ounces. The spirit is not decorative: it depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice from setting into a solid block.
Silk sieveA silk sieve is a fine straining cloth, the ancestor of the fine chinois or a nylon drum sieve. Any very fine mesh works; the point is to remove skin fragments and cell walls so the ice reads smooth on the tongue.
The small, long freezerThis is the sorbetiere, a narrow canister packed in ice and salt and worked by hand. Twenty minutes of vigorous working in two stages corresponds to churning in a modern machine; the Italian meringue is worked in during the first stage, which lightens the mixture rather than leaving it a hard sorbet.
Vanilla sugar on the cut fruitThis is doing real work. Sugar draws out juice and slows enzymatic browning on peach and apricot flesh, which oxidizes within minutes of cutting. Do it as you cut, not after.
YieldThe proportions differ between the two groups: a pint of syrup to a quart of pulp for the peaches, apricots and nectarines; a pint of pulp to a quart of syrup for the cherries, pomegranates, currants and barberries. With a pint of Italian meringue per quart of syrup plus the citrus juice, either version comes out at roughly two quarts of finished ice.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and the ice chapters show how much of a nineteenth-century restaurant's reputation rested on frozen work: ices were molded into fruits, baskets and architectural pieces, and a house needed a reliable syrup scale to produce them consistently night after night. Water ices of this kind descend from the Italian and French glaces à l'eau that reached the American table through French-trained chefs, and the fruit list here is a fair census of what a well-supplied market could offer, from nectarines and pomegranates to barberries and medlars, both now scarce in American shops. The kernel-crushing step for cherries reflects the old conviction that a stone fruit's flavor is completed by its pit, the same logic behind noyau, ratafia and the almond note in classic frangipane; it was standard practice long before the chemistry of amygdalin was widely understood in kitchens.