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PERSIAN SHERBET (another way)
Pick a pound of ripe strawberries, and bruise them well with the back of a wooden spoon. Put them into a basin, with a fresh lemon, cut into thin slices, and a tea-spoonful of orange-flower water, and pour over them a quart of cold water. Let them remain for three hours, then strain the liquid through muslin, and squeeze the fruit well to make it yield as much juice as possible. Mix with the juice a pound of refined loaf sugar, and stir until the sugar is dissolved; then strain it again, and place the vessel containing the sherbet on ice until it is wanted for use. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for nearly three pints of sherbet.
A cold-infused strawberry drink, not a frozen dessert. Nothing here needs cooking, so the whole thing turns on how much flavour you pull out of the fruit in three hours and how little bitterness you pull out of the lemon.
- Quantities in modern termsA pound of strawberries is about 450 g, roughly 3 cups hulled, and a pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. The volumes are imperial: a quart is 40 fl oz (about 1.14 litres), and "nearly three pints" is a little under 1.7 litres, or six generous glasses. (Read as US measures they would be about 950 ml and 1.4 litres.)
- Loaf sugarRefined loaf sugar was hard cone sugar, broken and crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute. A pound to a quart is very sweet by current taste oughly half and adjust upward once the juice is strained.
- The lemon is the riskSliced lemon left three hours in cold liquid gives up pith and peel bitterness as well as juice. Slice thinly but pull the slices at the hour mark, or use the pared zest plus the juice of one lemon instead.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in small bottles in Middle Eastern groceries or the baking aisle. Modern brands vary enormously in strength; start with half a teaspoon in this volume and taste, since too much reads as soap.
- Bruising, not pureeingThe wooden spoon matters. A blender emulsifies pulp and seeds into the water and the sherbet will never strain clear e press the berries against the side of the bowl and let them slump.
- StrainingMuslin or a double layer of cheesecloth over a sieve. Squeeze hard for yield, as instructed, then strain again after the sugar dissolves the second pass catches the fine sediment that the pressing forces through.
- "Place on ice"This means chilled, not frozen the Victorian icebox equivalent of the refrigerator. Serve within a day; with no cooking and no preservative the fresh strawberry aroma fades fast and the colour browns.
- CostOne shilling for nearly three pints was a real expense for a cold drink, given the pound of refined sugar and a pound of fresh fruit.
"Sherbet" comes through Turkish şerbet, itself by way of Persian, from Arabic sharbah, a drink, and in nineteenth-century English cookbooks it still meant what it means in the Middle East: a sweetened, chilled fruit infusion, not the frozen dairy product Americans later attached the word to. Cassell's gives a further version under the Persian label, and the orange-flower water is the tell distilled floral waters were the standard perfuming agent in Persian, Ottoman and Levantine sweets and drinks, and reached British kitchens through the same trade that brought rose water into confectionery. Recipes of this kind appear in Victorian household dictionaries partly as genuine hot-weather refreshment and partly as a mild exoticism for the summer table; the reliance on ice to serve it also marks the period when commercial ice, cut and shipped in bulk, was becoming more widely available, though how far down the middle class the habit of keeping some on hand had spread is less certain.