Italian Sorbet

A citrus water ice built on a plain sugar syrup, with a splash of wine for flavour and a softer set. The instruction to "prepare and freeze same as Pineapple Frappe" is doing most of the work, so the method has to be reconstructed.

• The syrup comes firstThe original gives no method here, deferring to the Pineapple Frappe entry, so this is a reconstruction: boil the 4 cups water with the 2 cups sugar until the sugar is dissolved, then cool it completely before adding any juice. Heating citrus juice dulls it and drives off the aroma that the dessert depends on.
• Strain the juiceGrapefruit and orange juice both carry pulp and membrane, which freeze into gritty threads. Pass all the juice through a fine sieve before combining.
• "Grape fruit"Period spelling for grapefruit, then still a fairly new commercial fruit in American markets. Many widely grown modern varieties are sweeter than those available when the book was written, so the mixture may taste a shade less bracing than intended.
• The wine is unspecifiedA quarter cup in a batch this size is a flavour note, not a base. Sherry, Marsala or a white dessert wine all suit; at this proportion the sugar, not the alcohol, is what keeps the texture soft.
• Freezing without a churnThe original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. An ice cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes until it is uniformly granular.
• Frappe versus sorbetA frappe is deliberately frozen only to a coarse slush, not to a scoopable solid. Stop while the mixture still slumps in the spoon, and serve at once in chilled glasses.
• YieldAbout two quarts, which fills eight to twelve small glasses. Water ices were often served in modest portions, sometimes between courses rather than at the end of a meal.