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SHERBET, RHUBARB (a pleasant summer beverage)
Take six or eight sticks of ripe red rhubarb. Wash it well, and without skinning it cut it up into short lengths. Put it into a saucepan with a quart of water, and let it boil till the flavour is extracted. Rub the rind of a fresh lemon upon three ounces of fine sugar in lumps. Stir this into the liquor until dissolved. Let the sherbet stand in a cool place five or six hours, filter through muslin, and it will be ready for use. Time to boil, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A cooling rhubarb drink of the sort Victorian households made in quantity through May and June. The method is sound; only the units and a few habits need translating.
- How much rhubarbSix to eight "sticks" means whole trimmed stalks, which comes to somewhere around 1 to 1.5 lb depending on thickness. Weigh rather than count if your stalks are unusually thick.
- Leaves off, alwaysTrim and discard the leaves before anything else. Rhubarb leaves carry high levels of oxalic acid and are not food; only the stalks go in the pan.
- Do not skin itThe instruction looks deliberate. Much of the colour sits in the red skin, and a peeled stalk gives a paler, less appealing liquor. "Short lengths" is left to the cook; an inch or so, skin on, does the job.
- UnitsA quart in this book is imperial: 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres. Three ounces of sugar is roughly 6 tablespoons, or a scant half cup; adjust upward if your rhubarb is very sour, as the drink is less sweet than a modern soft drink.
- The lemon-on-sugar trickRubbing a lemon against lump sugar strips the zest oil straight into the sugar. Sugar cubes still work; with granulated, zest the lemon finely and rub it into the sugar with your fingers, then dissolve. This oil, not lemon juice, is what carries the perfume.
- Twenty minutes is enoughBoil only until the stalks collapse and the water is pink and fragrant. Longer cooking dulls the colour and pushes the liquid toward stewed-fruit flavour rather than a drink.
- StrainingLet it drip through damp muslin or a fine sieve without pressing or stirring the pulp. Squeezing forces pulp and fibre through and turns a clear pink infusion cloudy.
- Yield and servingSomewhat less than the quart of water you started with, once boiled down and strained; the recipe calls it enough for three or four. Chill thoroughly and serve over ice; it also thins well with sparkling water.
- KeepingThere is no preservative here beyond sugar. Refrigerate and drink within three or four days.
"Sherbet" here means what it meant in Britain for most of the nineteenth century: a cold, sweetened, unfermented fruit drink, from the Arabic sharbah (also given as sharbat) by way of Turkish şerbet, and not the frozen ice the word now suggests in American usage. Cassell's places it among the summer beverages that filled a good deal of space in Victorian household manuals, alongside lemonades, barley waters and raspberry vinegars, and it is tempting, though it goes beyond what the book says, to read such drinks as temperance-friendly alternatives to beer at the family table. Rhubarb suited the purpose exactly: it was a hardy garden perennial that cropped early, before soft fruit arrived, and the forcing sheds of the West Riding of Yorkshire would in time send tender pink stalks to market in quantity, though that trade expanded mainly later in the century. The costing of eightpence, given as a matter of course, is a reminder that this book was written for households that budgeted a drink to the penny.