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Raspberry Sherbet
1 pt. raspberry juice (canned) 1 qt. water 2 cups sugar juice 2 lemons Boil sugar and half the water to form thick syrup, add rest of water, the raspberry and lemon juice. Freeze as soon as mixture is cold, let ripen an hour before using.
A water ice rather than a cream sherbet: no dairy, no egg, no gelatin. The sugar syrup is the whole structure, so measure it rather than eyeballing.
- VolumesA pint of raspberry juice is 2 cups; a quart of water is 4 cups. Total mixture is roughly 7 cups before freezing, serving 8 to 10 as a small course.
- Canned raspberry juiceOnce a standard grocery item, now uncommon. Bottled raspberry juice or nectar works, or press and strain thawed frozen raspberries (roughly 2 to 3 lb for a pint of juice). If using a sweetened nectar, reduce the sugar accordingly.
- "Thick syrup"Boil 2 cups sugar with 2 cups water until it is clear and slightly viscous, about 5 minutes at a full boil. It should not colour or reach the thread stage; this is a simple syrup, not candy.
- Chill fully before freezing"Freeze as soon as mixture is cold" means refrigerator-cold, not room temperature. A warm mix churns slowly and comes out coarse. Chill several hours or over an ice bath.
- Freezing methodThe original assumes a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer. A modern ice cream machine handles it directly; without one, still-freeze in a shallow pan and whisk hard every 30 minutes to break up crystals.
- RipeningThe hour of "ripening" is the resting-and-hardening stage after churning: originally the packed freezer was left standing in its ice and salt, and in a modern kitchen the equivalent is an hour in the freezer. It firms the texture and settles the flavour; skipping it gives a slushy sherbet.
- Sugar and textureDo not reduce the sugar much further than noted above. Sugar is what keeps a water ice scoopable; a leaner mix freezes into a solid block.
Raspberry sherbet of this kind, sugar syrup with fruit and lemon juice and nothing else, descends from the water ices that European confectioners served between courses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the word itself is generally traced through Turkish sherbet to Arabic sharbat, a sweetened drink. By the early twentieth century the frozen course was as likely to appear as an inexpensive, make-ahead dessert as a mid-meal palate cleanser. Canned and bottled fruit juices, cheap and available year round, made that easier, and this recipe leans on them rather than on a raspberry season.