Eliza Leslie’s “Strawberry Ice” isn’t exactly a Maryland recipe. I made this dessert to partake in the Dundurn Recipe Challenge. Since I didn’t get to a dedicated blog recipe, here it is.
Dundurn Castle is a historic site operating as a civic museum in Hamilton Ontario. The mansion was built in 1835, on the site of a former British military encampment, for railway magnate and Candian legislator Sir Allan MacNab. The estate has been the property of the city of Hamilton since 1899.
Hamilton is a long way from Maryland and indeed I have never been there. But social media has created a fun way to connect over historic cooking. For the first challenge, the people at Dundurn turned to Eliza Leslie’s 1850 “Lady’s New Receipt-book.” Leslie’s 1837 cookbook, “Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches,” was the most popular cookbook of the 19th-century cook-book boom, and her recipes were shared and imitated far and wide.
The confectioners’ hand-book, E. Skuse, 1883
Though Leslie was born in Philadelphia (and many of her recipes originated in the Philadelphia cooking school of Elizabeth Goodfellow), her parents hailed from Cecil County Maryland.
Fruit ices like this one, which is essentially a sorbet, were a popular frozen dessert, often cheaper and easier to make than ice cream. Without all the dairy fat, they are also a bit more refreshing for hot summer days.
In Maryland, the most popular ice flavor appears to have been orange, followed by pineapple, then lemon. Maryland cookbook authors preferred their strawberries in ice cream.
For more elegant preparations, ices were frozen in a mold. A recipe in Maryland’s Way, contributed by Cmdr. J. Harrison Colhoun, lines the mold with frozen whipped cream before pouring the strawberry filling inside.
According to Eliza Leslie’s 1857 “New Cookery Book” “the most usual form of ice cream moulds are pyramids, dolphins, doves, and baskets of fruit.”
My own ice mold happens to be in popsicle form so I went with that. Strawberries being just a little past season here I put them in the oven for a bit to coax out some juice. Overly ripe strawberries would work best for this.
I only ended up with 3 popsicles but they were excellent. I put the strawberry pulp (sweetened) in molds as well. Why waste? Delicious also. It happened to be horribly hot out so all these popsicles were a welcome relief. Next post I have a little more involved of a frozen treat to discuss but Strawberry Ice and its byproducts all prove that when it comes to fruit and cold things its hard to go wrong.
Recipe:
“Strawberry Ice is made of ripe strawberries put into a linen bag, and the juice squeezed out. Then measure it, and to each pint of juice allow a half a pound of powdered loaf-sugar. Having mixed thoroughly the juice and the sugar, put it into a freezer and freeze it. In this manner ices (without cream) may be made of currant and raspberry juice, mixed raw with sugar.”
Recipe from “Miss Leslie’s Lady’s New Receipt-book,” 1850
