Cranberry Mallobet: or, Homemade Cranberry Soft-Serve

The original recipe was amazing right up to and excluding the last sentence.

Cranberry Mallobet 1¼ cup cranberry juice ¼ cup orange juice (fresh-squeezed if possible) 1 tsp lemon juice 1 cup sugar (white or brown), divided into two ½-cup portions 1 egg white* 20 marshmallows, or 5 oz mini marshmallows Red food coloring, if desired Melt the marshmallows in the cranberry juice, either by cooking in a saucepan over medium heat or in the microwave. If using a microwave, stop and stir every 40 seconds until the marshmallows are almost completely broken down. Then cook long enough to bring to a vigorous boil and then give a good hard stirring. Continue boiling and stirring until the marshmallows are dissolved. (Honestly, just do this on the stove- it's faster.) Remove from heat and add the orange and lemon juice. If the cranberry juice was unsweetened before you added the marshmallows (check the label), add ½ cup of sugar and stir until dissolved. Chill the mixture. Then beat the egg white until frothy. Gradually add the remaining half-cup sugar, beating constantly. Gently fold it in. If desired, add food coloring to make it a more definitive cranberry red. Freeze in an ice cream machine. Then transfer to the kitchen freezer and leave until firm. *If raw eggs are concern, use a pasteurized-in-the-shell egg. If you're wondering what you'd do with the rest of a carton of pasteurized eggs, you can cook them the same as ordinary eggs. You can't tell the difference. Mrs. Russell Ayres, 1817 Forster St, Harrisburg Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13, 1935; page 12

I wanted to make this as soon as I read the name. The word "Mallobet" sounds almost cloyingly whimsical, like the name of a cartoon character of ambiguous species that you would see on one of those children's shows where everybody frolics among the flowers and learns about telling the truth and sharing toys. 

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, 13 September 1935

Theoretically, the recipe is quite simple. You squeeze the juice out of cranberries, add some marshmallows to suds them up, add a whipped egg white to fluff it some more, and then put the whole mixture in the freezer before it has a chance to deflate. After a few hours, you should have a reasonable simulacrum of ice cream. 

I don't know why we're supposed to put baking powder in the water, but let the record show that I did.

In nearly no time at all, we were ready to shove our cranberries through a colander. The easiest way I found was to put a small plate on the mound of berries and shove it downward. After we had squeezed out all we could, the remaining cranberry paste was so tasty that I deeply regretted having no recipes lined up to use it.

Our juice tasted very diluted, like Kool-Aid after all the ice has melted. We also had a lot more of it than the 1¼ cups that Mrs. Ayres claims that we should. I poured the excess into a glass to taste it, and was underwhelmed. Nevertheless, I added precisely 20 marshmallows to what remained. These marshmallows had caused a minor scuffle in the kitchen when someone had the nerve to eat them.

"Don't eat those marshmallows!" I yelped. "They're counted!"

"What?" He stared at the bowl of marshmallows, trying to figure out why they had become a precious resource.

"How many did you eat?"

"Oh good grief...."

After replacing the marshmallows he ate (two of them, in case you wondered), we could proceed to turn our cranberries into a delicious ice cream. Or so I thought.

Things looked all right at first. The marshmallows turned into a thick layer of foam on top of the berries. But as they continued melting, the foam dissipated. Remember how our lemon-beer pie turned into a layer of suds on top of a murky fluid? We had that again, though this time it was a rather charming shade of pink instead of an ugly beige.

Looks like we might have accidentally landed on a new way to make our own Jello 1-2-3.

Our mallobet tasted like it could become really good ice cream if it acted like the recipe claimed. Most of the flavor came from the orange juice because Mom had sent me off from Thanksgiving with some really good oranges.  But I could still tell why Mrs. Ayres got the $2 basket of groceries and her name in the paper.

Had the mallobet-in-progress tasted underwhelming, I would have followed Mrs. Ayres's direction to "freeze in tray of automatic refrigerator without stirring." Then I would have thrown the ensuing pink ice brick into the sink and closed out the recipe with unsurprised disappointment. But this had potential. You could tell that it wanted to turn into something good.

So, I forced success upon our mallobet. Thinking of our earlier prune whip and the ambiguity of older freezers, I decided that perhaps you're supposed to refrigerate this without freezing it. Maybe the marshmallows add enough gelatin to turn it into a wobbly dessert. Refrigeration did nothing, so I decided to repair this mess with, naturally, more gelatin.

Our cranberry whip wasn't the mallobet Mrs. Ayres meant it to be, but it was still pretty decent. I wasn't excited or in a rush to repeat it, but I didn't mind having made it either.

However, I couldn't quite get the recipe out of my mind. In its earlier failed stages, it was was some of the best melted ice cream I've ever had. You could tell what it wanted to be. So with that in mind, I put the mallobet aside until the next time I was at my parents' house. They have an ice cream machine in the closet and an ice maker in the fridge. And really, what good is the ice maker if we don't completely empty it without asking everyone?

This time, I decided to spare myself the bother of juicing my own cranberry pulp. This is a new millennium, and we now have cranberry juice in bottles. Additionally, since it it is no longer winter (I made our first failed mallobet in early December), I let the stove stay cold and used the microwave instead. As I found out, marshmallows are surprisingly resilient in the microwave. For the first several minutes of cooking time (more than long enough to partially carbonize a standard-issue frozen dinner), they resolutely stayed like this.

If you see any lines through the marshmallows, that's where I tried to cut through them with a spoon. They glued themselves back together like sugary self-healing mats and remained frustratingly intact.

Eventually, the marshmallows broke into clumps, turning our bowl into a half-decent terrazzo sample.

After boiling the cranberry juice for a looooong time in the microwave, we still had a few specks of marshmallow that absolutely refused to give in. This might have been faster on the stovetop. I know we're trying to keep things low-heat, but you're looking at the result of twenty minutes of stopping and stirring.

Moving on with the recipe, we have previously learned that a whipped egg white can only take so much sugar before it loses its peaks. I knew this would happen, but did this anyway. We ended up with this sort of goop that floated over the berry juice. 

So now, we were ready to split off of Mrs. Ayres' directions and get out the ice cream machine! This is the same one I bought when I wanted to make water ice. I don't know whether to say it's surprisingly durable for still working after so many years or not. After all, it hasn't left its box since before the pandemic.

Or at least, the machine was durable. But after so many years of quietly gathering dust in the closet (I really should have closed the box), the barrel started leaking brine all over the counter. I always thought the motor would burn out first.

Behold the salt trail spurting out of the to the leak site.

As the sub-freezing brine uselessly dripped away, I got progressively angrier at this recipe and at fate. It felt like the universe was snatching my mallobet away from me. So, I went online to see if anyone was unloading an ice cream machine for cheap. I really wanted one of those fancy machines that has its own freezer so I wouldn't have to faff with ice and rock salt ever again. This turned up for $30.

I was super excited to get this, becoming more so when I read the instruction (of course I read the manual) that the bowl "The freezer bowl must be completely frozen before you begin your recipe."

"Ah!" I thought. "Its built-in refrigerator needs six hours to warm up!" So, I plonked one of the bowls into place and turned the machine on. The bowl started spinning, but I saw no way it could possibly get cold. It was then that I realized: I didn't miraculously get a self-freezing ice cream machine for the cost of a pizza delivery. I got one of those ones where you have to make room for an entire bowl in your freezer. This meant that I would have to wait a long time before we could see if the cranberry ice cream was any good.

Furthermore, both of the freezer bowls were leaking some unidentifiable white substance from around their top seams. I didn't know if they were now too poisonous to use (even after a trip through suds), or even if they still had enough fluid in there to make enough internal ice. I chucked them in the freezer because I couldn't return this machine anyway.

And so, muttering a lot of words unfit for impressionable children, I threw some badly folded towels on top of the dribbly ice cream machine, hoping that what ice remained would at least keep it cold.

After waiting a long time and fielding a lot of reasonable yet annoying questions like "What's that on the counter?" and pointing to all the styrofoam packaging to ask "What are you going to do with that mess?" it was time to see if our mallobet was capable of turning into ice cream. 

I was a bit nervous when I got it out of the machine. It seemed too runny to be a real ice cream-- like it would just turn into rock-hard ice in the freezer. But I think it was as frozen as the machine would ever get it. 

I shouldn't have worried. After a few hours in the freezer, our mallobet was perfect. And it tasted incredible. Using bottled cranberry juice added so much more flavor than our own homemade watery runoff. And it was fantastically smooth. I wonder if the gelatin in the marshmallows prevented little ice crystals from forming as it froze.

This stayed soft in the freezer (probably because the marshmallows added enough sugar to substantially lower the freezing point) and tasted amazing. It was well worth the second ice cream machine. Even though it has no dairy, it was wonderfully creamy. I'm very glad I didn't throw out the recipe after the first time it didn't work.

As a postscript, I mildly unnerved my sister when I said "It's dairy-free but it's not kosher!"