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Grape Sherbet
1 quart grape juice 1/4 cup lemon juice 1/2 cup sugar 2 cups cream To the grape juice add the sugar and lemon juice. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Turn into a freezer and chill. When beginning to freeze, add the cream and continue to freeze.
A churned sherbet from the era of the hand-crank freezer, with cream added late so the acid in the grape and lemon juice has less chance to curdle it. Yield is roughly two quarts.
- "A freezer" means a crank churnThe original assumes a wooden bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume. An electric ice cream maker does the same job; the sequence of chilling first, then adding cream partway, still applies.
- The hinge: add the cream cold and lateGrape juice plus lemon juice is acidic enough to curdle dairy. Chill the cream thoroughly, pour it in only once the base has begun to set into slush, and keep the dasher turning as you add it so it disperses immediately.
- Grape juiceMost likely bottled or home-canned unsweetened juice, Concord being the common American variety. A modern sweetened juice cocktail will make the finished sherbet cloying; reduce or omit the sugar if that is all you have.
- Sugar is low for a frozen dessertHalf a cup to a quart of juice reads sparse to a modern palate and, more practically, gives a harder, icier set. Three-quarters to a full cup dissolves in as readily and keeps the texture scoopable.
- CreamPeriod "cream" was somewhere near today's light or whipping cream. Heavy cream gives the smoothest result; half-and-half will freeze noticeably grainier.
- Still-freezing without a machinePour the sweetened juice into a shallow metal pan, freeze to slush, whisk in the cold cream, then beat with a fork every 30 minutes until firm. Skipping the beating gives a solid block rather than a sherbet.
- Ripening and servingPack the finished sherbet into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour before serving to firm up. Let it stand a few minutes at room temperature before scooping; the low sugar makes it stiff straight from the freezer.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period sat between water ice and ice cream: fruit juice frozen with a little dairy stirred in, lighter than a custard-based cream. Meatless cookery books were compiled for households observing Lent and fast days or following the vegetarian arguments circulating in the early twentieth century, and they needed full menus, desserts included. Bottled grape juice made the recipe possible year-round; unfermented pasteurized juice had been promoted since the late nineteenth century, partly by temperance advocates who wanted a communion and table drink without alcohol, and by the 1910s it was a common shelf item rather than a novelty.