Shaved ice with homemade fruit syrups

Put the fruit in a pot unpitted and unpeeled with a little water, at most enough to cover; heat on high.

Boil until the fruit starts to fall apart -- a couple of minutes for a delicate berry, about 20 minutes for cherries -- mashing to help; add water if the pan looks too dry.

Pour into a fine sieve over a bowl and press the solids with a stiff spoon to extract the juice; discard the solids.

Rinse the pot, return the juice and add sugar, up to an equal quantity at most; boil on high until dissolved and the bubbles stack on each other. Pull off before it boils over.

Cool, taste and adjust; add lime juice if it needs acid. It should taste too sweet and too tart on its own.

Store covered and refrigerated; to cool fast, set it in a bowl of ice water and stir now and then.

Pulse ice cubes in a food processor, or better, in a blender on its ice-crushing setting, for finer snow.

Variation: for wide thin flakes, freeze a wide pan of water for a few hours and scrape the surface lightly with a large steel chisel washed of its non-food oil.

Variation: make kumquat, strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry-lemongrass and pomegranate syrups the same way, mashing the kumquats, blueberries and pomegranates; strawberries are soft in five minutes.

Variation: add lime juice to the blueberry syrup and balsamic vinegar to the strawberry syrup for acid.

Pour the syrup over the ice in the glass; syrup refrigerated overnight flows slower and spreads more evenly.

Variation: pour sweetened condensed milk over the ice instead of syrup, with cherries.