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Peach Sherbet
1 quart peach puree 1 1/2 cups orange juice 1/4 cup lemon juice 1 cup water 1 1/2 cups sugar Select nice ripe peaches, pare, and put a sufficient number through a colander to make a quart. To this add the orange juice, sugar, lemon juice and water. Turn into the freezer.
A straightforward fruit sherbet with no dairy and no cooked base, written for a hand-crank ice-cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt. The only real work is getting the peaches smooth and the sugar fully dissolved before freezing.
- "Turn into the freezer"This means a churn freezer — the inner can surrounded by crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, cranked until stiff. A modern ice-cream machine handles it directly; without one, still-freeze in a shallow metal pan and beat the mixture thoroughly with a fork or in a food processor two or three times as it sets, or the texture will be coarse and icy.
- Dissolve the sugar firstThe sugar goes in raw, and in a cold acidic purée it dissolves slowly. Stir the sugar into the water and juices until no grit remains before adding the peaches; undissolved sugar sinks and the finished sherbet freezes unevenly hard.
- "Through a colander"Here the colander does the work of a food mill or sieve — pressing pulp through and holding back skins and fibre. A blender or food processor is quicker but leaves the purée frothy; sieve it afterward if you want a clean texture.
- PeachesFreestone peaches at full ripeness, pared after a brief dip in boiling water so the skins slip. A quart of purée takes roughly 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 lb of fruit. Underripe supermarket peaches give a flat, faintly bitter sherbet; frozen sliced peaches, thawed, are a better substitute than hard fresh ones.
- Sugar and acid balanceTotal sugar is modest for the volume of liquid, so the mix freezes quite hard. Taste before churning: it should be distinctly sweeter than you want the finished sherbet to be, since cold mutes sweetness. Add sugar by the tablespoon if the peaches are bland.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 quarts, serving 10 to 12. Sherbet with no fat or egg sets rock-solid in a home freezer; move it to the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes before scooping.
- StorageBest within a day or two. Peach purée darkens with time even under sugar and lemon juice, and the ice crystals coarsen quickly in a mixture with nothing to stabilise them.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period meant a water ice built on fruit juice or purée, sweetened and frozen without cream or custard — the word came into English from Turkish and Persian sharbat, a sweetened cold drink, and the frozen sense settled in only during the nineteenth century. The recipe also reflects the season it was written for. Peaches were a brief high-summer crop, arriving by rail in large quantities and spoiling fast, and households with an ice-cream freezer and a cheap supply of ice used them at their peak; oranges and lemons, shipped by rail from Florida and California, supplied the acid that keeps a peach ice from tasting dull.