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Sherbet, Strawberry
Pick a pound of ripe strawberries, and bruise them well in a bowl. Mix with them the strained juice of a lemon and a table-spoonful of orange-flower water, and pour upon them three pints of cold spring water. Let them soak for four hours. Powder a pound of white sugar, and put it into another bowl. Squeeze the strawberry liquor into this through muslin, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Strain it again, and set it on ice till wanted. Serve in glasses. Time, four hours and a half. Probable cost of strawberries, 4d. to 6d. per pound. Sufficient for a dozen persons.
This is a sherbet in the older sense: a cold fruit drink, not a frozen dessert. Nothing here is cooked, so the whole result rests on ripe fruit and thorough straining.
- It is a drinkDo not put this in an ice cream machine. It is served in glasses as a chilled cordial, closer to lemonade than to sorbet. Three pints of water to a pound of fruit tells you the intended strength.
- Quantities in metric and US measureA pound of strawberries is about 450 g, roughly 3 to 4 cups hulled. Three imperial pints is 60 fl oz, or about 1.7 litres — noticeably more than three US pints, so use 7 to 7.5 US cups.
- Sugar is adjustableA pound of sugar to 1.7 litres of liquid is very sweet by current taste. Start with half, dissolve it fully, then taste and add. "Powdered" white sugar here means finely ground loaf sugar, so ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the right substitute — not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the liquid.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries or the baking aisle. It is potent and varies by brand; a tablespoon of a strong modern distillate can taste soapy, so add half and judge before adding the rest.
- Soak cold, not on the counterThe four-hour maceration should happen in the refrigerator, covered. The original assumed a cool larder and "cold spring water"; tap water is fine, but four hours at room temperature in a warm kitchen is asking for fermentation and off flavours.
- StrainingMuslin means a fine cloth — cheesecloth doubled, or a jelly bag. Squeeze firmly for yield, then strain a second time as directed if you want a clear liquid; pressing hard drives pulp through and gives a cloudy glass.
- Yield and servingAbout 1.7 litres, which the book calls sufficient for twelve — that is small glasses, roughly 140 ml each. Serve very cold over ice, with a whole berry or a strip of lemon peel.
- KeepingWith no cooking and no preservative beyond sugar and lemon, this is a same-day drink. Refrigerate and use within twenty-four hours.
The word sherbet comes through Turkish şerbet from Arabic sharba, a drink, and in English it long meant exactly this: sweetened fruit juice diluted with water and chilled, a beverage rather than a frozen sweet. Orange-flower water in the list points to that Ottoman and Persian lineage, where distilled floral waters flavoured cooled drinks before they reached European kitchens. By the later nineteenth century ice was more widely available in British towns, imported in bulk from Norway and North America and sold from commercial ice wells, which is part of why an instruction to "set it on ice till wanted" could be given to a domestic cook without further explanation. The costing of fourpence to sixpence a pound suggests strawberries in season rather than out-of-season fruit, which suits a recipe that uses a full pound to make twelve glasses of something mostly water.