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Strawberry Sherbet
Select sweet fresh strawberries, one quart; mash the fruit smoothly; three pints of water, the juice of one lemon added to it and strained over one light pound of white sugar; squeeze the cloth well, and after mixing thoroughly, strain and place in ice three hours before needing it.
A very plain fruit water ice: crushed berries, lemon, sugar syrup, strained and frozen. The instructions assume a pail packed in ice and salt, and they leave out the one thing that decides whether you get sherbet or a solid block.
- Churn it, don't just chill it"Place in ice three hours" most likely means packing the mixture in a freezer can or pail surrounded by cracked ice and coarse salt; the recipe itself does not say whether it was turned as it set or simply left. Undisturbed, it freezes into a lemon-strawberry brick, so use an ice cream machine, or still-freeze in a shallow pan and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours.
- A light pound of sugarAbout 2 cups, slightly under-measured rather than heaped. That is roughly 425 g against 3 pints of water and a quart of berries, which is on the lean side for a sherbet; sugar is what keeps the texture scoopable, so do not reduce it further.
- Three pints of waterSix cups, US measure. The finished quantity is close to two quarts, or eight to ten servings. If you want a more intense result, drop the water to two pints and keep the sugar as written.
- The clothThe recipe never says to put the fruit in a cloth, but "squeeze the cloth well" tells you it happened: the mashed berries go into muslin or a jelly bag and are wrung out to get juice without seeds or pulp. Cheesecloth or a fine sieve pressed with the back of a ladle does the same job.
- Dissolve the sugar firstPouring the water and lemon juice over the sugar and stirring cold works, but warming a cup of the water to make a syrup and then adding the rest cold is faster and leaves no grit.
- BerriesA quart of hulled strawberries is about 1 1/2 lb. Modern supermarket berries are often paler in flavour than the small field fruit assumed here; taste before freezing and add lemon juice rather than sugar if it seems flat, since freezing mutes both sweetness and acid.
- ServingSherbet frozen without a machine sets hard. Move it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before serving, or let it stand at room temperature 5 to 10 minutes.
In American cookbooks of this period "sherbet" meant a water ice, usually fruit juice, sugar and water, sometimes lightened with beaten egg white or milk — distinct from ice cream, which carried cream or custard, and cheaper to make in a household that had to buy its ice. The word itself came into English directly from Turkish şerbet and Persian sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, in the seventeenth century — it is "sorbet" that arrived by way of the Italian sorbetto and French — and the drink sense survived in nineteenth-century usage alongside the frozen one. Recipes like this one belong to the era of the hand-cranked freezer and the ice delivery wagon, when freezing anything at home still meant buying ice by the block, chipping it, and packing it with rock salt. The terse phrasing here — no yield, no mention of turning the crank — suggests a compiler who took the machine and its handling for granted.