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Grape Sherbet
1 pint grape juice 1 cup sugar 1 quart cold milk Dissolve the sugar in rich grape juice; add the milk; mix thoroughly and freeze.
A three-ingredient milk sherbet of the kind that filled the frozen-dessert chapter of nearly every American cook book a century ago. The whole thing hinges on how you combine the acid juice with the milk.
- Expect curdling, and manage itExpect some curdling -- Grape juice is acidic enough to flocculate milk protein on contact. The recipe as printed sweetens the juice and then adds the milk to it; work with everything cold, add slowly and stir constantly, and get the mixture into the freezer at once. A few fine curds are usual in this style of sherbet and are largely masked by churning; letting the mixture stand warm is what produces coarse clots.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe original assumes a hand-crank ice-and-salt freezer. In a modern machine, chill the mixture to refrigerator temperature first, then churn 20-25 minutes and ripen it in the freezer an hour before serving. Still-freezing in a pan works only if you beat it thoroughly two or three times as it sets.
- Grape juice"Rich grape juice" implies a strong, sweet unfermented juice, most likely Concord, whether bottled or put up at home. Modern white grape juice or a thin juice cocktail will taste of almost nothing once diluted by a quart of milk; use a full-strength purple Concord juice, unsweetened if you can find it.
- SugarOne cup to three pints of liquid is on the low side for a churned dessert, and sugar is what keeps the texture soft. If your juice is unsweetened, the finished sherbet will be firm and icy; a couple of extra tablespoons will not make it cloying.
- The stray lineThe trailing "1 quart milk" is a stray repetition of the ingredient line, not a second addition. Use one quart total.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what the recipe intends and what makes this a sherbet rather than an ice cream. Skim or low-fat milk gives a noticeably harder, more crystalline result.
- YieldAbout three pints of mixture, roughly a quart and a half frozen, or six to eight small servings.
Milk sherbets sat in an odd middle ground in American cookery: too lean to be ice cream, too rich to be a water ice, and they turn up constantly in early twentieth-century books because they were cheap, used no eggs, and could be made with the bottled fruit juices then coming onto the market. Unfermented grape juice in particular had a specific cultural footing — it was promoted heavily from the late nineteenth century onward as a temperance drink and a sickroom tonic, and it came to be a pantry staple rather than a novelty. A recipe like this one is really a demonstration of the freezer's usefulness more than of any culinary tradition: three things from the icebox and the shelf, stirred together and cranked. The deliberate pairing of acid juice with plain milk may suggest that the risk of curdling was well enough understood to need no comment, though that is only an inference.