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Sorbet of Rum
Make the ice as before, but before freezing mix with the sorbet a quarter of a pint of strained lemon-juice. When frozen, flavour with three table-spoonfuls of fine old Jamaica rum, and serve it in glasses with the roasts.
A rum version of the mid-meal water ice, built on the sorbet base given earlier in the book: essentially a sugar syrup thinned with water, sometimes lightened with beaten white of egg or meringue. Two things govern success — how much lemon goes in before freezing, and the fact that the rum goes in after.
- "A quarter of a pint"An imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. That is a lot of lemon against a sweet syrup base, which is the point: the sorbet is meant to cut through a heavy meal, not to taste like dessert.
- The base"Make the ice as before" means the plain sorbet of the preceding entries, a sugar syrup let down with water; the exact proportions are not given in this entry. Aim for a syrup that tastes slightly too sweet before the lemon goes in, since freezing mutes sweetness.
- Why the rum goes in lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so spirit stirred into the base before freezing keeps the mixture softer and slower to set. Freeze the lemon sorbet hard first, then beat the rum through it and return it to the freezer briefly to firm up.
- "Fine old Jamaica rum"Victorian Jamaica rum meant a dark, heavily pot-distilled spirit with pronounced ester character — funky, banana-and-tar notes rather than caramel smoothness. A modern pot-still Jamaican dark rum is the closest match; a light or spiced rum will disappear against the lemon.
- Freezing methodA kitchen of this date would freeze such an ice in a metal freezing pot packed in a tub of ice and salt and worked with a spatula, though hand-cranked churns were also in use. A machine churn gives a smoother result; without one, still-freeze in a shallow metal tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for two to three hours.
- Serving temperatureServe it soft rather than solid. A sorbet frozen rock-hard reads as sweeter and duller, and the rum aroma, which is the whole justification for the dish, will not lift.
- YieldThe book gives none. Portions are small: two or three spoonfuls in a glass, no more.
Serving a spirit-laced water ice partway through dinner "with the roasts" was standard practice in the elaborate multi-course meals of the later nineteenth century, and the form is often said to descend from the Roman punch that appears on French and Anglo-French menus. The ice arrived with the roasts, its stated purpose being to refresh the palate. Jamaica rum, arriving in Britain in quantity through the West India trade, was the assertive dark spirit of the period, prized precisely for the pungency that later blended rums smoothed away. Cassell's places the recipe in a run of sorbet variations, each differing only in the spirit or liqueur beaten in at the end.