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Sherbet, Rich
Grate the thin rinds of fresh lemons with lumps of loaf sugar, and press the juice and pulp into a bowl, rejecting the seeds. Crush the sugar, rubbing and blending the ingredients with a silver spoon. Then add calf's foot jelly, newly made, and Madeira wine, with any spirit you please. Stir a long while, and after the sherbet has stood two or three hours, filter it until beautifully clear.
A drink rather than a frozen dessert, and one written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the proportions. Nothing here is quantified, so treat it as a method and scale to taste.
- The hinge: rub the rind, do not zest itThe hinge: rub the rind with the sugar -- Dragging a lump of sugar across a lemon draws out the peel oil and traps it in the sugar — what bartenders now call oleo-saccharum. This, not the juice, is what makes the drink taste of lemon rather than of acid. Note that the "long while" in the recipe refers to the stirring after the jelly and wine go in, not to the rubbing.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone, broken into lumps with nippers. Sugar cubes behave the same way against a lemon; if you use granulated you lose the abrasion that does the work.
- A silver spoonProbably specified because iron and other base metals could taint acid mixtures; the recipe itself does not say why. Stainless steel, glass or wood is fine now.
- Calf's foot jellyA clear, lightly set stock jelly made by long-boiling calves' feet, used here for body. "Newly made" probably means fresh and still liquid from straining. Powdered or leaf gelatine dissolved in water gives similar weight; use a light hand, since the drink should thicken slightly on the tongue, not set.
- Madeira and "any spirit you please"A period wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a reasonable measure for the Madeira, with a spoonful or two of brandy or rum for the spirit. The recipe gives no quantities and no guide to strength.
- Standing and filteringThe two or three hours let the sugar dissolve fully and the sediment drop. Filter through a jelly bag or a coffee filter, and let it drip without squeezing — pressing pushes cloud through.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. A workable starting point is 4 lemons, 8 oz sugar, 1 pint of jelly and the wine and spirit above, which fills six small glasses. Serve cold in stemmed glasses, not over ice, as dilution flattens it.
"Sherbet" comes through Turkish şerbet from the Arabic sharba, a drink — non-alcoholic fruit syrups of the Ottoman and Persian world, which European travellers brought home as a word long before the thing itself settled into any fixed form. By the nineteenth century English usage had split: sherbet powder for children, water ices in the French manner, and drinks of this sort, in which the temperance ancestry has been quietly abandoned in favour of Madeira and brandy. The calf's-foot jelly places it firmly in a household with a stockpot going and time to spare, its faint richness in a lemon drink a deliberate luxury. Cassell's prints it among the principles rather than the menus.