Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Water Ices

A chilled dessert made by mashing fruit, extracting juice, mixing with syrup, and freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Syrup and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Water Ices

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove the stalks from the fruit and mash it well in an earthen pan with a wooden spoon, adding a little sugar to help extract the juice.

  2. Rub the mashed fruit through a sieve to extract the juice.

Mix and freeze

  1. Mix the fruit juice with 1 pint of syrup and let it cool.

  2. Freeze the mixture according to your preferred method for about 1 hour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  3. Currant + syruptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together329 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh fruit juice
Provides the main fruit flavour and acidity that defines the water ice.
Syrup
Supplies sweetness and sugar that keeps the ice smooth rather than rock-hard.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juice when mashing.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture according to your preferred method for about 1 hour.. Cool the mixture fully before freezing. Warm liquid freezes slowly and forms large ice crystals, so the texture turns coarse and grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesOranges in SyrupOranges in Syrup9 recipes