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Watermelon Sherbet
Boil down pale sherry with loaf sugar until quite a thick syrup. When cold mix with fine sweet melon chopped very fine (using only the heart of the melon). Freeze as you would ice, but should not be too hard. Serve in glasses.
A two-ingredient water ice with no quantities attached, which is typical of the period; the cook was expected to judge by eye. The hinge is the syrup — it has to be reduced far enough to sweeten and body the melon juice, but cooled completely before it touches the fruit or the melon turns to mush.
- No quantities givenThe original names only "pale sherry," "loaf sugar" and "fine sweet melon," with no amounts for any of them. Any modern proportion is guesswork: reduce sherry and sugar to a thick syrup, then add it to the chopped melon a little at a time, tasting as you go, before freezing.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in solid cones or cut cubes, broken or crushed before use. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct replacement, measure for measure.
- Which melonThe title says watermelon, but the instruction itself asks only for "fine sweet melon," so any ripe sweet melon would suit. With watermelon, take the dense core; with a muskmelon or cantaloupe, the flesh nearest the seed cavity is sweetest.
- Pale sherryA fino or amontillado rather than a cream sherry, which would push the mixture too sweet once the sugar is reduced into it. The alcohol will also keep the ice from setting hard, which suits the instruction that it "should not be too hard," though the recipe gives no reason for that direction.
- Freeze as you would iceAt the time this was written that meant a hand-cranked churn in an ice-and-salt bath, scraped and turned until slushy. An ice cream maker does the same work; failing that, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for two to three hours, which gives a granita texture close to what was intended.
- Do not overfreezeThe alcohol content means this will never set as firm as a dairy ice, and it should not. Aim for a spoonable slush; if it has gone solid, let it stand 10 minutes and break it up before serving.
- Yield and servingA quart of chopped melon plus syrup gives about six small glasses. Serve in chilled stemware immediately after churning — it slumps quickly and does not hold well in the freezer overnight.
Sherbets in American cookbooks of this era were not the dairy-lightened sherbets of the modern freezer aisle but water ices, often fortified with wine or spirits and served between courses of a long dinner to clear the palate — the same role the Roman punch and the sorbet played on French menus. Their presence in a general household book reflects how far ice had come: commercial ice delivery and the domestic crank freezer were both well established by this point, putting frozen desserts within reach of ordinary kitchens. The wine here does double duty, flavouring the ice and depressing its freezing point so that it stays soft in a hand-cranked churn, a trick cooks of the period understood by experience long before anyone explained it to them chemically.