George Anderson
FRUIT SHERBET
1/2 envelope Knox Sparkling Gelatine (scant measure) 1½ cups sugar 1 orange 3 cups rich milk 1 lemon Grate the outside of both orange and lemon. Squeeze out the juice and add to this the sugar. Soak the gelatine in part of a cup of milk for five minutes, and dissolve by standing in pan of hot water. Stir into the rest of the milk. When it begins to freeze add the fruit juice and sugar, and fruit of any kind if desired. This makes a large allowance for five persons.
A gelatine-set milk sherbet from the era of the hand-cranked freezer. It works in a modern ice cream machine, but the order of operations is what keeps it from curdling.
- The hinge: add the juice lateCitrus juice stirred into cold milk will curdle it on contact. The instruction to add the sweetened juice only "when it begins to freeze" is not optional — by then the mix is thick and near-frozen, and the acid disperses as fine flecks rather than breaking the whole base.
- Knox Sparkling GelatineA granulated unflavoured gelatine, sold then as now in envelopes of about 1/4 oz (roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons). Half an envelope, scant, is a bit over 1 teaspoon of any modern unflavoured powdered gelatine. It is there for body, not for setting a mould.
- Rich milkPeriod shorthand for unhomogenised whole milk with the cream still in it, or milk topped up with cream. Whole milk with about a third of a cup of heavy cream substituted in gets you close; skim milk will freeze hard and icy.
- Dissolving the gelatineSoften it in cold milk for five minutes, then set the cup in hot water and stir until completely clear. Undissolved grains give a stringy texture that will not smooth out in the freezer.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, cranked by hand. In a modern churn, chill the milk-gelatine base thoroughly first, churn until it looks like thick slush, then pour in the sugared juice and any chopped fruit and churn to finish.
- SugarA cup and a half in three cups of milk reads as very sweet, but freezing mutes sweetness and the sugar is also what keeps the texture scoopable. Cut it back much and the mix will freeze noticeably harder.
- ZestGrate only the coloured outside of both fruits; the white pith underneath is bitter. Rub the zest into the sugar before adding the juice to draw out the oils.
- YieldRoughly a quart once churned, "a large allowance for five persons" — closer to six or eight modern servings. Ripen it in the freezer an hour before serving.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries, one of a genre of publicity cookbooks — possibly, though not certainly, tied to a charitable purpose — in which stage performers lent their names to family recipes; the collection dates from the mid-1910s, when Broadway names carried the kind of commercial weight that film stars soon would. The recipe is a milk sherbet rather than a water ice — an American line of frozen desserts that sat between sorbet and ice cream, thickened with gelatine to compensate for the low fat and the coarse texture a hand-cranked bucket freezer produced. The specific brand-name call for Knox Sparkling Gelatine is telling: granulated gelatine had only been a convenient household product since the late nineteenth century, and Knox promoted it hard through recipe pamphlets, so home cooks of this period wrote its name into recipes the way later ones would write Crisco.