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Pineapple Sorbet
Take a medium-sized pineapple, and cut it up into very small pieces. Put these into a bowl with a pound of sugar, and beat well together. Add the juice of two lemons and one orange, the grated rind of half a lemon and half an orange, half a gill of maraschino, and a quart of water. Strain through a fine hair-sieve, and freeze until it is a semi-liquid. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A water ice in the older sense: served soft and barely set, closer to a drink than to a scooped dessert. Two details govern the result — the sugar ratio and the point at which you stop freezing.
- Half a gill of maraschinoA gill is a quarter of a pint, so by imperial measure half a gill is about 2½ fl oz (roughly 70 ml). Maraschino here means the clear, dry Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of neon cherries.
- The sugar is doing structural workA pound of sugar to a quart of water plus the fruit gives a heavily sweetened syrup, and that is deliberate: sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the mixture slushy rather than solid. Cutting the sugar back will give you a block of flavoured ice.
- "Freeze until it is a semi-liquid"This is the hinge. A sorbet in this style is meant to be spoonable slush, served in glasses; it was never intended to be firm. Stop while it still slumps.
- Hair sieveA fine-meshed sieve of woven horsehair, one of the finer strainers in a Victorian kitchen. Any fine nylon or wire mesh sieve does the same job; press the pulp hard to extract everything, as the pineapple fibre is what you are removing.
- How it was frozenThe original assumes a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, turned until the mixture thickened. An ice-cream churn reproduces it directly; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every twenty minutes or so.
- The pineapple'Medium-sized' is imprecise; reckon on about 2 lb of trimmed flesh, and taste before adding all the sugar if your fruit is very ripe.
- YieldRoughly three pints of strained mixture before freezing — enough for eight or so servings in small glasses, which is how a sorbet of this kind was often offered, sometimes between courses rather than at the end of a meal.
- Probable costTwo shillings and sixpence was a real outlay for a household dessert in late Victorian Britain; the pineapple is likely the largest single part of it.
This appears to belong among water ices rather than creams, and the distinction mattered at a Victorian table: a sorbet was often served midway through a long dinner, in a small glass, as a pause between the heavier courses — a habit borrowed from French service, where the sorbet preceded the roast. The maraschino is part of that convention rather than a flourish; the liqueur both flavoured the ice and, being alcohol, helped keep it from setting hard. Pineapple in a British kitchen of this date could come from the hothouses of large estates, which had grown the fruit since the eighteenth century, or increasingly from imports arriving by steamship from the West Indies and the Azores — still expensive enough that the fruit signalled a certain kind of household, but no longer the near-mythical luxury it had been a century earlier.