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Sherbet, Ice
Take half a pound of refined sugar in lumps; rub these upon the rind of three lemons until the yellow part is taken off. Put the sugar into a bowl, and strain over it the juice of two oranges and of the lemons. Add a pint of cold spring water, and stir themixture until the sugar is quite dissolved. Freeze in the usual way, and serve in glasses. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for a pint and a half of ice.
A water ice of the plainest sort: citrus, sugar, water, no dairy and no egg. Everything depends on the sugar rubbed against the peel, which is where the flavour actually comes from.
- Rub the sugar on the peelThis is the hinge. Dragging lump sugar over the zest tears out the oils and leaves you with an oleo-saccharum far more aromatic than grated zest steeped in juice. Loaf sugar is scarce now; use large rough sugar cubes, or coarse granulated sugar rubbed into the zest by hand with a bowl and pestle.
- Half a pound of sugarAbout 1 1/8 cups of granulated sugar, 225 g. Do not cut it back much: sugar is the only thing keeping this from freezing into a solid citrus brick.
- A pint of waterAn imperial pint, so 20 imperial fl oz, a little under 2 1/2 US cups. "Spring water" here most likely means simply clean fresh water; tap or filtered water will serve.
- Freeze in the usual wayIn period terms, a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked and scraped. An ice cream machine does the job; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal tray and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth one.
- Texture and timingWith no fat, egg or alcohol the mix sets hard and fast. Serve it within an hour or two of churning, or let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
- YieldA pint and a half imperial, about 30 imperial fl oz or roughly 850 ml. That is four to six small glasses; the recipe says only to serve it in glasses.
- BalanceModern lemons and oranges vary far more than the recipe allows for. Taste the unfrozen mixture; freezing mutes both sweetness and acid, so it should taste slightly too sharp and slightly too sweet in the bowl.
- Probable cost, 10dTenpence. Cassell's prints a probable cost for its dishes, so the housekeeper could price each one.
"Sherbet" comes into English from Turkish şerbet and Arabic sharbat, a sweetened, often chilled fruit drink, related to the same root that gives us syrup. English use of the word for the drink is recorded from the early seventeenth century, and it was only later applied to the frozen version, which is why Victorian books use sherbet, water ice and sorbet almost interchangeably. By the later nineteenth century ice was a commercial commodity, shipped and stored in urban ice-houses, and a plain citrus ice was a matter of technique rather than a luxury. The rubbing of sugar on citrus peel is older still, familiar from eighteenth-century punch-making and carried into the ices more or less unchanged.