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Cranberry Sherbet
4 cups sugar Juice of 1 lemon 3 pints water 2 quarts cranberries After looking over the berries carefully, cover them with hot water, and cook until tender; then strain through a colander or sieve sufficiently fine to exclude the seeds. Add the sugar, and cook until dissolved, then add the lemon juice, and turn into a freezer. This sherbet should not be allowed to stand in the freezer any length of time.
A plain water ice built on cooked cranberry pulp, written for a hand-crank freezer. Two details matter: the sugar is high because cranberries are aggressively acidic, and the finished sherbet was never meant to sit.
- "Turn into a freezer"This means an ice-cream freezer packed with crushed ice and rock salt, not the freezer compartment. In a modern ice-cream machine, chill the syrup thoroughly first and churn until it holds soft peaks; in a shallow pan, stir and scrape every 30 minutes.
- Why it must not standA sherbet with no dairy, egg or stabiliser freezes into a solid brick of sweet ice within a few hours. Churn it and serve it the same hour, which is exactly what the last line is warning about.
- The quantities2 quarts of cranberries is about 2 lb, or roughly two and a half to three standard 12-oz bags. 3 pints is 6 cups; 4 cups of sugar is 1 3/4 lb.
- Where the water goesThe recipe is ambiguous. The berries are covered with hot water to cook, and the 3 pints is best read as that cooking water, strained through with the pulp. Measure the strained puree and top up with water to roughly the 3 pints the recipe specifies before adding sugar.
- StrainingA colander will not hold back cranberry skins and seeds. Press the cooked fruit through a fine sieve or food mill, working the pulp hard; discard only the skins and pips.
- SweetnessFour cups of sugar to 2 lb of fruit is very sweet by current taste, but sugar is also what keeps a water ice scoopable, so cutting it back will give a harder, icier result.
- YieldAt least 2 quarts. Such ices were often served in small portions between courses rather than as a dessert.
Cranberry sherbet belongs to a family of water ices that filled a specific slot in turn-of-the-century American menus: a sharp, dairy-free ice served midway through a long dinner or alongside roast fowl, closer in spirit to a sauce than a dessert. It is made with nothing but berries, sugar, water and lemon. The cranberry itself is a North American native, harvested from cultivated bogs in Massachusetts and New Jersey by the late nineteenth century and cheap enough in autumn to be used by the quart. Freezing it required an ice-and-salt crank freezer and a supply of ice, and the closing warning about not letting the sherbet stand is a reminder that the freezer was a churn, not a place to keep things.