Gertrude Mackay’s 1913 Recipe for ‘Sweet Cider Frappe’
“Pack the can of a freezer with one measure of salt mixed with three measures of crushed ice. When the can is frosted, pour in sweet cider and freeze like sherbet. Serve with roast turkey or immediately after it.”
Gertrude Mackay, Two Hundred and Nine Ways of Preparing the Apple (1913)
‘Tis the season! And today we have another of Gertrude Mackay’s suitable seasonal recipes, this time for a palate-cleansing frappe, or frappé if you want to be fancy, of cider. I sounds like it would be a really pleasant accompaniment and/or palate refresher if you served it up as part of your Christmas dinner, perhaps along with the ‘Apple Ginger‘, ‘Stuffed Apples to Serve With a Roast‘, and ‘Apple Christmas1Allegedly… Pudding‘ that Gertrude has already treated us to.
‘Frappé’ is the past-participle of the French verb frapper, meaning to strike repeatedly, which in the context of a beverage, means one that has been chilled by repeatedly “striking” it – i.e. shaking it – with ice. Wiktionary.org confirms frappé as an umbrella-term for both “a frozen fruit-flavoured dessert or appetizer” and “a liqueur or cocktail served on shaved ice”. However, if you search online for “frappé” you’ll find a lot of results for “frappé coffee” from a lot of coffee companies claiming that it refers to an iced coffee drink invented in Greece in 1957. Which is clearly a re-interpretation of the facts for marketing purposes, because just a tiny bit of research turns up a book called Ice-cream and Cakes, A New Collection of Standard Fresh and Original Receipts for Household and Commercial Use, by “An American”, which was published in 1883, and which, on page 135, includes a recipe for “Frozen Coffee”, with the detail:
“This is a very popular ice in France, and is called “Café frappé à la glace”.”
I mention this only to stick one in the eye of the marketing departments of international coffee conglomerates, who clearly haven’t bothered to do their research. But I digress.
Back to Gertrude’s ‘Sweet Cider Frappe’, which I think sounds delightful. The end result would most likely be what we in the U.K. would call a sorbet today – a form of frozen or semi-frozen fruit juice and syrup – rather than a sherbet, which in its beverage incarnation was traditionally made by a freezing a blend of fruit with milk or cream. That’s because in the U.K. what we think of as ‘sherbet’ is usually a sweet, slightly effervescent powder that probably could be mixed into a drink, but is more often eaten with a stick of liqourice. Although of course, ‘sherbet’ and ‘sorbet’ both have the same linguistic roots in Persian and Arabic words for drinks, especially chilled ones. Sorry, digressing again…
Gertrude’s method for making ‘Sweet Cider Frappe’ is simplicity itself: freeze sweet cider until it reaches the desired, frappe / frappé / sherbet / sorbet consistency. Easy. One thing you may be wondering though: “what’s a can freezer”?
Well, back before the advent of electrical refrigeration and freezing, the quickest way to make up a batch of ice cream or sorbet was to use a manually operated can-freezer: a cylinder, or can, that was packed with salt and ice as described in the recipe, inside which a container of your cream or fruit pulp mixture would slowly freeze. Can freezers often took the form of an upright drum, with a large handle on the side for turning and churning the mixture as it froze. Other models were a bit more sleek-looking, such as ‘The Imperial’, a tombola-like device as advertised in The South London Press in 1898:
Or there’s ‘The Ideal’ from the Toronto Saturday Night in 1900:
One quart in three minutes and it only costs four bucks? Sign me up! Wait, that’s about $150 in today’s money? Okay, I’ll have a think about it and get back to you.
Of course, you might think that obtaining a can freezer would be all but impossible, on the grounds that the device itself is somewhat redundant these days. But when you think about it, a can freezer is just a manual version of an electric ice cream maker2Affiliate link to Amazon.co.uk, just in case you want to treat yourself… 😉, which does the turning and churning for you at the push of a button, and there are plenty of those to choose from.
Now then, at this point we have to talk about the term “sweet cider”. Here in the U.K., and similarly around most of the world, we know what cider is: fermented apple juice. And it can be labelled “sweet”, “medium”, “dry”, etc. depending on, well, how sweet it tastes. Whereas if we’re talking about the freshly-pressed, unfermented juice of apples, it’s called “apple juice”.
So to us, a “sweet cider” would probably be something cheap from the supermarket, like Magners, Bulmers, or one of those Kopparberg fruit-cocktail-alcopops that pretend to be cider for marketing purposes3Don’t get me started…. Either that or a well-keeved cider, which would tend to be on the sweet side4And would be neither cheap nor available in the supermarket..
However, if you’re reading this with a North American perspective then you might be confused, maybe thinking that if you press apples you’ll get “cider”, or “sweet cider”, whereas if you want the alcoholic version you have to ask for “hard cider”.
I initially thought that this bit of linguistic gymnastics was the product of that failed 1920s social experiment called “Prohibition”; just an anomaly that hadn’t been tidied away quite yet. However, further research via ChatGPT suggested an older origin, with the LLM turning up several mid-nineteenth century newspaper advertisements for “sweet cider”, in the sense of fresh apple juice, as well as details of discussions within the mid-nineteenth century Temperance Movement – neatly summed up in this article on Mark A. Turdo’s Pommel Cyder blog – as to whether “sweet cider” should be prohibited to its members as well as alcoholic cider.
Which is why, when Gertrude’s 1913 recipe calls for “sweet cider” it’s not entirely clear whether she does actually mean a sweet-tasting form of proper, alcoholic cider, or just plain apple juice. Her recipe was published before Prohibition kicked off in 1920, which might suggest proper cider. But I can’t find any biographical details for Gertrude online, so I don’t know whether she was a supporter of the Temperance movement or not, which she may have been signalling by telling us to use “sweet cider”.
Anyhow, my suggestion would be to use proper, boozy cider. It’s Christmas, after all, and the cider’s alcohol content might lead to a slightly slushier end result, which is presumably the texture you’re looking for.
What do you think? Would you serve up Gertrude’s ‘Sweet Cider Frappe’ as a palate-cleanser between courses of Christmas dinner? Or as a light dessert, instead of a Christmas pud? Do let me know, via the comments.
