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Punch Sorbet
Rub the rind of an orange and of half a lemon with four ounces of lump sugar; add a gill and a half of good green tea (strained), a gill of brandy, the same of rum, half a gill of pine-apple syrup, a glass of maraschino, a pint bottle of champagne, and as much more sugar, made into a plain syrup, as may be necessary to sweeten it to taste. Then freeze, and serve plain, or with a garnish of fruits.
A Victorian dinner-table sorbet: essentially an iced punch, meant to be served in small glasses between courses rather than as dessert. The alcohol load is the thing that governs everything else about it.
- It will not freeze firmAround half a pint of spirits plus a bottle of champagne, against roughly the same volume of tea and syrup, puts the alcohol high enough that a domestic freezer is unlikely to set it. Expect a soft, spoonable slush; churn the sweetened tea and pineapple syrup to a firm sorbet first and fold the brandy, rum, maraschino and champagne in at the end if you want any body at all.
- GillsIn a British book of this period a gill is 5 fl oz, so a gill and a half of tea is 7.5 fl oz and the brandy and rum are 5 fl oz each. If you are working from US measures a gill is 4 fl oz; the difference across four separate quantities is not trivial, so pick one system and stay in it.
- A pint bottle of champagneAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, though in the wine trade of the period a 'pint' bottle was often a half-bottle rather than a full 20 oz. A modern 750 ml bottle is about 26 imperial fl oz, so roughly three-quarters of a bottle, or accept a slightly wetter, boozier result.
- A glass of maraschinoProbably a liqueur or small wine glass, somewhere between 1 and 2 fl oz. Maraschino here means the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries.
- Rubbing the sugar on the rindThis is oleo-saccharum, and it is the step that carries the flavour. Rub the whole lumps hard against the unwaxed fruit until they are stained and damp with oil, then dissolve them in the hot tea. Zesting into the sugar and muddling works if you have no lump sugar.
- The teaBrew it strong and strain it well; at this dilution weak tea disappears entirely behind the spirits. Green tea in this period meant gunpowder or a similar unfermented China tea, which is tannic enough to give the mixture backbone.
- Pineapple syrupThen a standard confectioner's fruit syrup, now most easily had as the syrup from canned pineapple, or made by simmering fresh pineapple trimmings with an equal weight of sugar and straining.
- SweeteningSugar depresses the freezing point along with the alcohol, so taste before you add the extra plain syrup. The mixture should taste slightly sweeter than you want, since cold mutes sweetness, but every spoonful of syrup past that makes it less likely to set.
- YieldAround two and a half pints of liquid before freezing; how many of the small stemmed glasses it fills depends on their size. Garnish, if you use it, means a few pieces of fresh or preserved fruit set on top at the table.
Sorbets of this kind belong to the middle of the formal Victorian dinner, not the end of it: a small iced glass served after the entrées and before the roast, on the theory that something cold and sharp reset the palate and the appetite. The genre is generally traced to the Italian and French sorbetto and punch à la Romaine, and by the late nineteenth century the punch sorbet had become a fixture of English catering. The composition reads like a punch bowl scaled down and frozen, and it depends on two things the late nineteenth century had in abundance: commercial ice, delivered or cut and stored, and a sideboard stocked with imported spirits, maraschino from the Adriatic and champagne from Reims. That the spirits keep it from ever freezing hard was not a flaw to the Victorian host but the point, since the semi-frozen texture is often said to be what distinguished a sorbet from a water ice.