Ices

• Ices are too often regarded as expensive luxuries, and show how completely custom rules the majority of our housekeepers.

• There are many houses where the dinner may consist daily of soup, fish, entrées, joint, game, and wine, and yet, were we to suggest a course of ices, the worthy housekeeper would hesitate on the ground of extravagance.

• It is difficult to argue with persons whose definition of economy is what they have always been accustomed to since they were children, and whose definition of extravagance is anything new.

• The fact remains, however, that there is many a worthy signor who sells ices in the streets at a penny each, and manages to make a living out of the profit not only for himself, but for his signora as well.

• Under these circumstances, the manufacture of these “extravagances” is worthy of inquiry.

• Ices can be made at home very cheaply with an ice machine, which can now be obtained at a, comparatively speaking, small cost.

• With a machine there is absolutely no trouble, and directions will be given with each machine, so that any details here, which vary with the machine, will be useless.

• Ices can be made at home without a machine with a little trouble, and, to explain how to do this, it is necessary to explain the theory of ice-making, which is exceedingly simple.

• We will not allude to machines dependent on freezing-powders, but to those which rely for their cold simply on ice and salt mixed.

• We will suppose we want a lemon-water ice, I.E., we have made some very strong and sweet lemonade, and we want to freeze it.

• It is well known that water will freeze at a certain temperature, called freezing-point.

• By mixing chopped ice and salt and a very little water together, a far greater degree of cold can be immediately produced, viz., a thermometer would stand at 32° below freezing-point were it to be plunged into this mixture.

• An ice machine is a metal pail placed in another pail much larger than itself. The “sweet lemonade” is placed in the middle pail, and chopped ice and salt placed outside it.

• The proportion of ice to salt should be double the weight of the former to the latter. It is now obvious that if we have filled two pails, the one with “the sweet lemonade,” and the other with the ice and salt, very soon our lemonade will be a solid block of ice.

• To prevent this it must be constantly stirred, and, as the lemonade would of course freeze first against the sides of the pail, these sides must be constantly scraped. Inside the inner pail, consequently, there is a stirrer, which, by means of a handle, continually scrapes the side of the pail.

• It is obvious that if the stirrer is fixed, and the pail itself made to revolve, that is the same as if the pail were fixed and the stirrer made to revolve.

• To make lemon-water ice, therefore, place the lemonade in the inner pail, surrounded with chopped ice and salt, two parts of the former to one of the latter, turn the handle, and in a few minutes the ice is made.

• Now, suppose you have not got a machine, proceed as follows: take an empty, clean, round coffee-tin (the larger the better). [we mention coffee-tin as the most probable one to be in the house, but any round tin will do.] get a clean piece of wood, the same width as the inside diameter of the tin, only it must be a great deal longer.

• We will suppose the tin rather more than a foot deep and five inches in diameter.

• Our piece of wood, which should be clean and smooth, must be nearly five inches wide, say a quarter of an inch thick, and about two feet long.

• Next get a small tub, say nine inches deep, place the round tin in the middle, with the sweet lemonade inside; next place the piece of wood upright in the tin, so that the wood touches the bottom.

• Next surround the tin with chopped ice and salt up to the edge of the tub, fill it as high as you can, and then cover it round with a blanket, I.E., cover the ice and salt.

• Now get someone to hold the wooden board steady; take the tin in your two hands, and turn it round and round, first one way and then another.

• In a very short time you will find the tin to contain lemon-water ice. The following hints, rather than recipes, for making ices, I.E., for making the liquid, which must be frozen as directed above, are given, not because they are the best recipes, but because cream, which is the basis of all first-class ices, is often too expensive to be used constantly. Of course, real cream is far superior to any substitute.

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