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Sherbet, Lemon
Rub one pound and a half of loaf sugar upon nine fresh lemons until the yellow part is taken off. Put the sugar into a bowl, squeeze upon it the juice of the lemons, and add a quart of water. Stir the liquor till the sugar is dissolved, strain, and freeze as for ice cream.
SHERBET, PERSIAN. (See PERSIAN SHERBET--a refreshing summer beverage.)
A water ice in the older sense: no dairy, no eggs, just lemon, sugar and water churned until frozen. The whole character of it comes from one step that looks like a quaint flourish and is not.
- Rubbing the sugar on the peelThis is the hinge of the recipe. Dragging a hard lump of sugar over the zest tears the oil cells and captures the oil in the sugar, which carries far more lemon perfume than juice does. With modern granulated sugar, zest the lemons finely instead and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers until it is damp and fragrant, then let it stand 20 minutes before adding juice.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone or block, broken up as needed; there is nothing special about it chemically. Use 1 1/2 lb (about 3 1/3 cups) granulated sugar.
- A quart of waterIf the source is British, this is most likely an imperial quart, 40 fl oz, or a little under 5 US cups. With the juice of nine lemons (roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 cups) you end up near 2 quarts of syrup.
- Sugar is structure, not just sweetnessThat proportion of sugar looks heavy, and it is deliberate: sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps the ice scoopable rather than a solid block. Cutting it substantially gives you a lemon brick.
- Strain properlyPass the mixture through a fine sieve or muslin to remove zest, pith and pips. Zest left in the base turns bitter and grainy after a day in the freezer.
- "Freeze as for ice cream"At the time of writing that meant a pail freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, cranked and scraped. A domestic ice cream machine does the same job in 25-35 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours for a granita texture.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 to 2 quarts, serving eight to ten in small glasses. Serve soon after churning; with no fat or egg to hold air, it hardens noticeably after a day or two and is best left to soften a few minutes before scooping.
The word travels a long way before it reaches this page: Arabic sharbat, a sweetened drink, through Turkish şerbet, into Italian and French as sorbetto and sorbet, and into English in the early seventeenth century as a name for the cool fruit-and-sugar drinks of the Ottoman world. That is why Cassell's can list two things under one heading and cross-reference a Persian sherbet described as "a refreshing summer beverage" immediately after a recipe that is churned and frozen. Through the nineteenth century English usage was genuinely split, and the split has never fully closed: in Britain sherbet drifted toward fizzing sugar powder, while in America it settled on a frozen ice, usually one with a little milk in it. This version, with no dairy at all, belongs to the older water-ice tradition, and it appears in a general household dictionary rather than a confectioner's manual.