No. 3607

Strawberry or Raspberry Water Ice

Glace a l'Eau aux Fraises ou aux Framboises

Small ripe wild berries are preferable to cultivated ones for these ices. Put one quart of strawberry or raspberry pulp in a basin, and dilute with a pint and a half of cold syrup at thirty degrees; add a little vanilla, the peel of an orange, the juice of two oranges and of four lemons; strain through a silk sieve. The syrup should be from twenty to twenty-two degrees.

Another Way.-Take eight pounds of powdered sugar, two quarts of fruit pulp, the juice of twenty lemons and six quarts of water; color to a light red with vegetal carmine. Bring it to twenty degrees of the syrup gauge, strain through a silk sieve and freeze.

Iced Drinks

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a confectioner's syrup gauge and a hand-cranked freezer; the recipe is really a formula for sugar density rather than a set of measurements. Get the density right and the rest follows.

The degrees are Baumé"cold syrup at thirty degrees" means a syrup reading 30° on a Baumé saccharometer, a standard pastry syrup of the period, in the region of 1 kg sugar dissolved in 1 litre of water. The finished, diluted mixture is brought down to 20-22°Bé, roughly 36-40 percent sugar by weight. A cheap Baumé hydrometer or a refractometer settles it; guessing does not.
Why the density matters mostSugar concentration is what keeps a water ice scrapeable rather than a solid block or a slush. Too far below the range Ranhofer gives and it freezes hard and icy; too far above and it will barely set. Adjust with water or added syrup before churning, not after.
Quantities in the first versionOne quart of pulp to a pint and a half of syrup, plus the citrus, makes roughly two quarts of base — about 10-12 servings. Pulp means sieved fruit, so you will need rather more than 2 lb of berries to yield a quart of it.
The second version is a banquet batchEight pounds of sugar, two quarts of pulp and six quarts of water yields well over two gallons. Quarter it for a domestic freezer, and treat the twenty lemons proportionally; lemons vary widely in size and juice, so add the juice gradually and taste against the hydrometer reading.
Vegetal carmineA red colouring; the 'vegetal' qualifier suggests a plant-derived or manufactured red rather than true cochineal carmine, which is an insect product. Either way it is optional here — ripe berries colour the ice on their own.
Silk sieveA fine chinois or a doubled layer of muslin does the same job: removing raspberry seeds and strawberry pips, which otherwise read as grit in a smooth ice.
Wild berriesThe preference for small wild fruit is about flavour concentration, not romance. Supermarket strawberries are watery; macerate them with a little of the sugar for an hour and use the released juice, or reach for the frozen wild berries sold for baking.
ChurningChill the strained base thoroughly before it goes into the machine. A water ice with no fat or egg benefits from resting several hours in the refrigerator so the sugar is fully in solution, then churn and ripen an hour in the freezer before serving.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice chapters read like a professional confectioner's notebook because that is what they are: densities, gauges and syrups rather than cups. Water ices — glaces à l'eau, what we would now call sorbet — were a fixture of the long formal dinner, served either as a course in their own right or as the punch-like pause before the roast, following the entrées. The insistence on small wild berries reflects a period when fraises des bois and wild raspberries still reached city markets in quantity, and when cultivated strawberries had been bred for size and shipping rather than perfume. The syrup gauge itself, graduated in degrees Baumé, was standard equipment in any nineteenth-century pastry department and is generally traced to the eighteenth-century French chemist Antoine Baumé, whose hydrometer scale outlived most of his other work.