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Strawberry Sherbet
1 pint of crushed strawberries; 1 pint water; 1 pint sugar; juice of 2 lemons. Freeze. Any fruit may be substituted for strawberries.
Four ingredients in equal-ish proportion, with no method beyond the word "freeze" — which in this book means a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. The ratio is the recipe, and it is a sound one.
- What "freeze" meantThe original assumes a bucket freezer: the mixture goes in the canister, surrounded by crushed ice and coarse salt at roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part salt, and is cranked until stiff. An electric or frozen-bowl churn does the same job in 20-30 minutes.
- Without a machinePour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and break up the ice crystals with a fork every 30-40 minutes for about three hours. The texture will be coarser than churned sherbet but the flavour is identical.
- Sugar is structuralA pint of sugar to a pint of water is close to a 1:1 syrup, and that sugar load is what keeps the sherbet scoopable instead of freezing to a solid brick. Cutting it substantially will give you an ice block.
- Dissolve firstHeat the sugar and water together until clear, then cool completely before adding fruit and lemon. Undissolved sugar settles and freezes grainy.
- Strawberry preparation"Crushed" most likely means mashed by hand rather than pureed smooth, which would leave some texture. Press half through a sieve if you object to the seeds.
- The lemon is not optionalJuice of two lemons is roughly 1/4 cup. It supplies the acid that keeps a very sweet mixture from tasting flat, and it holds the strawberry colour.
- Sherbet here means no dairyIn this period an American sherbet is a water ice, sometimes lightened with beaten egg white. The modern supermarket sense, containing a little milk, came later; expect a clean, icy result.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/4 quarts of base before churning, once the sugar has dissolved, serving six to eight. Ripe, fully red fruit matters more than quantity — pale berries give a pale, thin sherbet.
The word travels a long way: Persian and Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, reached Europe through Ottoman Turkish as şerbet and became Italian sorbetto and French sorbet before English settled on "sherbet" for a frozen water ice. By the time compendia like this one were assembled, the hand-crank freezer patented in the mid-nineteenth century had put ices within reach of any household that could buy ice, and the ice trade made that possible well inland. The closing line — "any fruit may be substituted" — is the real point of the entry: it is not a strawberry recipe so much as a proportion to be memorised, a pint of fruit to a pint of water to a pint of sugar, applied to whatever the season offered.