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Strawberry Ice
(Gelato di fragola) Ripe strawberries, 3/4 lb.
Granulated sugar, 3/4 lb.
Water, one pint.
A big lemon.
An orange.
Boil the sugar in the water for ten minutes in an uncovered kettle. Rub through a sieve the strawberries and the juice of the lemon and the orange: add the syrup after straining, mix everything and pour the mixture in the freezer. 219
A plain fruit sorbetto: sugar syrup, strawberry pulp, citrus. The proportions are sound, but the original assumes a hand-cranked ice cream freezer and leaves out one step that decides the texture.
- Chill the syrup firstThe recipe says to add the syrup to the fruit and pour it straight into the freezer. Pouring a warm mixture into a churn wastes ice and gives coarse crystals. Cool the syrup completely, then combine and refrigerate the base until cold before freezing.
- "The freezer"In 1919 this meant a bucket freezer with an inner canister, packed with cracked ice and rock salt and turned by hand. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours for a granita texture.
- MeasuresThree-quarters of a pound of strawberries is roughly 12 oz, about 2 1/2 cups hulled. Three-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 2/3 cups. The pint is presumably the American 16 fl oz pint, given the book's New York publication, though the text does not specify.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetness12 oz of sugar to a pint of water is roughly three parts sugar to four of water by weight, concentrating further as it boils, and it is what keeps the ice scoopable rather than solid. Cutting the sugar significantly will give you a block of sweet ice.
- The sieveRubbing the berries through a sieve removes seeds and gives the smooth body Italian ices are after. A blender plus a fine sieve does it faster; press hard and scrape the underside of the mesh.
- CitrusOnly the juice is wanted. One large lemon and one orange come to roughly 3 to 4 fl oz together, which is a fair amount of acid and welcome with modern supermarket strawberries, which are usually sweeter and blander than the fruit the book assumes.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, serving six as a small dish. Ices of this kind were served in the middle or at the end of a long meal, in small glasses, and are best eaten within a day or two before they harden.
This comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a slim volume aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking, and its treatment of syrups and ices reflects a genuinely old strand of the cuisine. Water ices are generally traced in Italy to Sicily, where the Arabic sharbat is said to have given the technique and certainly gave the word sorbetto, and where flavored ices were being sold commercially long before household freezers existed. What distinguishes the Italian approach from the eggy custard gelati is exactly what you see here: no dairy, no eggs, just fruit pulp, a cooked sugar syrup and citrus for lift. The instruction to boil the syrup uncovered for ten minutes is not arbitrary; it drives off enough water to concentrate the sugar, and getting that concentration right was one of the few controls a cook had over texture, alongside the ice and salt ratio and the churning itself, in the days when the freezing was done by arm.