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Strawberry Sherbet
Use one quart of berry juice, four cups of sugar, the juice of two lemons, three pints of water and a few whole strawberries. Serve in a punch bowl with a block of ice, or freeze for frappe. -Annabel Lee.
A punch-bowl sherbet in the older sense: no milk, no eggs, just fruit juice, sugar and water, served either as a cold drink over ice or churned to a frappe. The recipe assumes you know how to get a quart of strawberry juice, so start there.
- Getting a quart of juiceFigure on roughly 4 to 5 quarts of hulled ripe strawberries, crushed, left to macerate an hour, then pressed through a jelly bag or fine sieve. Straining rather than pureeing is what keeps it clear enough for a punch bowl.
- Dissolve the sugar firstDissolving the sugar -- Four cups of sugar will dissolve in the cold juice and water with patient stirring, but it goes faster if you heat it with a pint or so of the water to a clear syrup and cool it before combining with the juice and lemon. Cooks who care about colour generally prefer not to add hot syrup to fresh strawberry juice.
- The sugar is deliberate, not excessiveFour cups to about 2 1/2 quarts of liquid reads as very sweet, and it is by modern standards, but sugar is what keeps a dairy-free ice from freezing into a solid block. Reduce it substantially and the frappe will freeze harder and coarser.
- Frappe means half-frozenA frappe here is a coarse, slushy ice, not a smooth sorbet. In a churn it is pulled at the stage where it still mounds on a spoon; without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for three to four hours.
- Punch bowl serviceThe block of ice is there to chill without diluting quickly, as loose cubes would. A large ice ring frozen in a bundt pan does the same job. Float the whole berries at the last minute so they stay intact.
- LemonTwo lemons gives roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup of juice. It is doing structural work against all that sugar; taste and add more if your berries are very ripe.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 quarts of liquid, which serves 15 to 20 as a punch or 8 to 10 as a frozen dessert.
Before "sherbet" settled into its current meaning of a fruit ice with a little milk in it, American cookbooks used the word for both a chilled sweetened fruit drink and the ice made by freezing one, a lineage that runs back through the Turkish and Persian sharbat to the Arabic sharab, meaning simply a drink. That double life is exactly what this recipe records: the same mixture is offered to be ladled from a punch bowl over a block of ice or churned into a frappe, and the cook chooses. The recipe carries a contributor's name at the end and assumes a great deal of common knowledge, including that the household already knew how to press fruit for juice and had access to block ice in summer. Strawberries, being the first abundant soft fruit of the year and impossible to keep, were a natural candidate for a party punch of this kind.