Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sorbet of Champagne
Sorbet of Champagne
Take a pint of plain syrup, a bottle of dry champagne, the juice of one lemon and four oranges, and some of the peel of both. Boil the syrup, and mix it with half the champagne, and the juice of the lemon and oranges. Let the peel soak in the boiling syrup for a quarter of an hour. Strain into a freezing-pan, and, when the ice is set, add the remainder of the champagne in small quantities.
A wine ice of the kind served between courses at a long Victorian dinner. It is simple, but the alcohol makes it behave unlike a fruit sorbet, and the book assumes you know what "plain syrup" and a "freezing-pan" are.
- Plain syrupSugar dissolved in water and boiled to a light density; period ices commonly used something in the region of 1 lb sugar to 1 pint water, though this recipe states no proportion. A pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so scale up by about a quarter if you are working from US measures.
- The freezing-panA pewter or tin canister set in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt, scraped and worked by hand as it froze. A domestic ice-cream machine does the same job; a still-freeze in a shallow metal tray, forked over every twenty minutes, is the closest hand equivalent.
- Why the champagne goes in twiceThis is the hinge. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, and a full bottle stirred in at the start would set very slowly, if at all. Freezing half the mixture first, then working in the rest a splash at a time once the ice has taken, is what gives a firm but slushy body.
- Steeping the peelPare the zest thinly with no white pith, and give it the full fifteen minutes in the hot syrup — the oils carry most of the aroma, since the juice alone reads as thin. Strain it out before freezing rather than leaving it in.
- Dryness mattersThe recipe specifies dry champagne because the syrup already carries the sugar. A sweet or demi-sec sparkling wine will push the mixture soft and cloying; any dry sparkling wine works, and the bubbles are lost in freezing regardless.
- Texture and holdingThe finished sorbet will never freeze hard, and should not. It softens quickly, so hold it in the coldest part of the freezer and serve it straight from there into chilled glasses.
- YieldA bottle of wine plus a pint of syrup and the juice comes to roughly a quart and a half of loose sorbet, enough for something like a dozen small servings.
The sorbet in a Victorian and Edwardian dinner was not dessert. It came midway through the meal, usually after the entrées and before the roast, as a cold interval meant to settle the palate and, in the polite explanation of the day, revive the appetite for what remained of a very long service. Wine ices of this sort — champagne, Marsala, rum punch — belonged to that slot, which is why the sugar is restrained and the finished ice is deliberately slack rather than scoopable. Freezing an alcoholic liquid in stages was the awkward part; ice-cream makers of the period worked with a salt-and-ice bath and constant hand labour, and a cook who dumped a whole bottle of champagne into the pan at once would have churned all evening for nothing. The custom faded with the shortening of formal menus after the First World War, though the champagne sorbet survives on its own terms as a dessert.