A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [187]
4 cups (1 quart) freshly picked honeysuckle blossoms (measure tightly packed but avoid bruising the flowers)
62/3 cups cool water
2 cups sugar
½ teaspoon fresh lemon juice
A tiny pinch of ground cinnamon (Bill takes it up on the tip of a boning knife)
1. Pick over the honeysuckle blossoms carefully, removing all leaves and bits of stem. Place the flowers in a large, nonreactive bowl and pour in 51/3 cups of the water. Place a heavy plate on top to keep the flowers submerged, and let stand on the counter overnight.
2. Next day, place the remaining 11/3 cups water in a small, heavy saucepan and mix in the sugar. Bring to a boil over moderate heat, then boil uncovered for 3 to 5 minutes or until about the consistency of light corn syrup. Remove from the heat, add the lemon juice (to keep the syrup from crystallizing), and cool to room temperature.
3. Meanwhile, strain the honeysuckle infusion, pressing the blossoms gently to extract every drop of nectar. Mix in the cooled syrup, then the cinnamon—“just a speck,” Bill cautions. “You don’t want to taste it but you can tell if it’s not there.”
4. Pour the honeysuckle mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s directions. Note: Stored tightly covered in the freezer, this sorbet will keep for about two weeks. Soften slightly before serving.
WATERMELON ICE
MAKES 8 SERVINGS
I dote upon watermelon as much as the next Southerner. But instead of devouring it by the slice, I churn it into this easy ice. Short of an A/C, it’s a fast way to take the sizzle out of summer.
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
½ cup cold water
One 7-pound chunk ripe watermelon
One 6-ounce can frozen pink lemonade or limeade concentrate, thawed
¼ cup light corn syrup
2 tablespoons sugar, or to taste
2 tablespoons fresh lime or lemon juice, or to taste
¼ teaspoon salt
Two to three drops red food coloring (optional)
1. Soften the gelatin in the cold water in a small heatproof bowl, set in a larger bowl of boiling water, and stir until the gelatin dissolves. Set aside.
2. Discard the watermelon seeds and rind, then cut the flesh into 1½-inch chunks. Purée in batches in a food processor or electric blender at high speed. Reserve 6 cups of the purée. Drink the rest as a “smoothie” or combine with a fresh fruit cocktail.
3. Mix the dissolved gelatin into the purée along with all remaining ingredients. Taste and add more sugar and/or lime juice, if needed.
4. Pour the watermelon mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s directions.
5. Dish up and serve.
FROZEN FRUIT SALAD
MAKES 8 SERVINGS
No southern cookbook would be complete without at least one frozen fruit salad because they were all the rage fifty years ago. Apparently they were known even earlier; in Fashionable Food (1995), Sylvia Lovegren reprints a frozen fruit salad recipe that had appeared in The Kelvinator Book of Recipes in the late 1920s or early ’30s—just when refrigerators were replacing iceboxes in homes across the South. (In some areas, Kelvinator is generic for refrigerator, as in “Honey, would you go to the Kelvinator and get me a Coke?”) As for frozen fruit salads, I don’t remember their being popular in my hometown of Raleigh until the ’50s. Suddenly everybody was talking about them. And in competitions as fierce as any card game, bridge club hostesses were one-upping one another by creating ever more cloying frozen fruit salads. Calling them “salads” was absurd, a silly euphemism. They were dessert pure and simple although often served on iceberg lettuce—with the main course. This recipe is representative of the frozen fruit salads so popular in the 1950s