Home › Village Receipts › Pineapple Sherbet (Three quarts of milk one quart)
Pineapple Sherbet (Three quarts of milk one quart)
Three quarts of milk, one quart of sugar; put in freezer and partly freeze, then add the juice of one pineapple and three lemons.
— Mrs. Jacob Hollenbeck
A milk sherbet of the old hand-crank sort: four quarts of base, frozen with ice and rock salt, with the acid held back until the milk is already cold and half-set. That order is the whole recipe.
- Add the juice last, and mean itAdd the juice last -- pineapple and lemon juice poured into liquid milk is likely to curdle it. Adding it once the base is cold and half-frozen appears to be the point of the instruction, and any curd that forms should stay fine and unobtrusive. If your machine has churned the base only to a slush, that is the moment.
- "Freezer" means the bucket"Freezer" here means the hand-cranked churn set in a wooden bucket packed with cracked ice and coarse rock salt -- period manuals commonly give something like three parts ice to one of salt. A modern ice cream maker does the same job, with one difference below.
- VolumeThree quarts of milk plus a quart of sugar plus the juices comes to something under a gallon of finished sherbet, since the sugar dissolves rather than adding its full volume. Almost no domestic ice cream machine holds that; expect to work in batches, or scale the quantities down substantially.
- A quart of sugarThat is about 1 lb 12 oz, or 800 g, of granulated sugar. It sounds enormous and it is deliberate: sugar is what keeps a lean, eggless, cream-free milk base from setting into a solid block. Cutting it much will give you a brick.
- The juicesOne ripe pineapple yields perhaps one to two cups of juice once grated and pressed; three lemons give about half a cup. Unsweetened canned pineapple juice substitutes, though it is flatter.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what is meant. The result is a true water-ice texture with a milky body — icy, granular, refreshing, nothing like ice cream. Chilling the base overnight before churning improves it noticeably.
- ServingThe full quantity fills a couple of dozen small glasses. It hardens fast in a modern freezer, so let it stand ten minutes before scooping, and eat it within a day or two before ice crystals coarsen.
Milk sherbets sit between the water ice and the ice cream, and they were common in American church and village cookbooks in the late nineteenth century because they were cheap: milk and sugar in bulk, with a single expensive fruit to carry the flavor. The word sherbet comes through Turkish şerbet from Arabic sharba, a sweetened drink; the frozen sense developed later in several European languages. Pineapple's appearance here is a marker of its moment — by the 1880s and 1890s Caribbean and Florida fruit was reaching northern towns by rail and steamer, and canned pineapple was arriving too. The lemons are not decorative; without their acid the pineapple alone reads as sweet and vague, and the pairing turns up in other period sherbet receipts. The recipe is signed, and assumes the reader already owns a freezer and knows how to pack it.