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Grape Fruit Sherbet
Take the juice of six pomelos, four cups of sugar, and a pint of water. Soak a tablespoon of gelatine in part of the water until dissolved, then bring to a boil with the water and fruit juice. When cool, freeze partially; add whipped whites of two eggs and finish freezing.
A turn-of-the-century citrus water ice, stabilised with gelatine and lightened with raw meringue. The technique is sound apart from the egg whites, which are never heated at any point.
- The raw egg whitesThe two whipped whites go into a partially frozen base and are never brought to any temperature at all. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it — it simply holds it dormant until the sherbet is eaten. A sherbet is also exactly the kind of dish served to children and elderly guests, the two groups least able to tolerate that risk.
- Why the gelatine step does not helpThe gelatine and juice are boiled, but that syrup is cooled and then partially frozen before the whites are folded in. There is no residual heat to pasteurise anything. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked Italian meringue should be used instead.
- Pomelos are not pomelosIn American fruit books of this era "pomelo" is the grapefruit, not the large thick-rinded Southeast Asian pummelo sold under that name today. Six grapefruit will yield somewhere between three and five cups of juice depending on size; six true pummelos would give a milder, much less acid result.
- A pint of waterTwo cups, US measure. With four cups of sugar and about three cups of juice this is a very heavy syrup by modern taste — period ice-cream freezers needed that sugar load to keep the mixture from setting into a solid block.
- A tablespoon of gelatinePeriod recipes routinely call for more gelatine than a modern cook would use. One standard envelope, about 2¼ teaspoons, will stand in for the old tablespoon; more than that will give the sherbet a chewy, jellied body.
- "Freeze partially"This assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, where the mixture is stirred continuously and reaches a slush in fifteen or twenty minutes. In a modern churn the equivalent point is when the base holds a soft ribbon on the paddle.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of base before churning, so eight to ten servings.
Grapefruit reached American tables late. Through most of the nineteenth century it was a curiosity grown chiefly in Florida and the West Indies and sold under the name pomelo or shaddock, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s tend to file it among the other citrus fruits rather than giving it a section of its own. Its arrival in quantity coincided with the golden age of the home ice-cream freezer, when any fruit juice with enough acid and sugar was fair game for a water ice. Sherbet in this period meant something between a sorbet and an ice cream: fruit juice and syrup, given body by gelatine and lightness by beaten egg white or, in richer versions, whipped cream. It was served in the middle of a long dinner as a palate cleanser as often as it was served for dessert, a habit often linked to the service a la russe menus of formal American entertaining at the time.