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Orange Pekoe Sherbet
1 teaspoon gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 2 cups Orange Pekoe tea 3/4 cup sugar Juice of 2 lemons Juice of 1 orange 1 cup white grape juice Soak the gelatine in the cold water for five minutes; pour on it the hot tea. Add the other ingredients and when cold freeze. In serving garnish with candied orange peel.
A tea sherbet in the older sense of the word: no dairy, just a sweetened, acidulated liquid frozen soft. The only technical step is dissolving the gelatine, which is there to keep the ice from setting into a solid block.
- The hinge: freeze it churned, not stillWritten for a hand-crank freezer, where constant paddling keeps the crystals fine. In an ice cream machine, churn 20-25 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break it up with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth sherbet.
- Gelatine measureOne teaspoon of granulated gelatine is a little under half a standard quarter-ounce envelope. If your gelatine is leaf, use one to one and a half sheets depending on its grade. Its job is texture, not setting; more will make the sherbet chewy.
- Make the tea strongTwo cups of orange pekoe brewed at ordinary drinking strength will be lost behind the citrus and sugar. Brew somewhat stronger than you would for the cup, steep no more than four or five minutes, and strain well; over-steeped tea turns bitter, and that tannic edge carries through into the frozen mix.
- Dissolve the sugar while hotAdd the three-quarter cup of sugar to the hot tea with the gelatine, before the juices go in. Undissolved sugar settles and the finished sherbet freezes unevenly.
- Juice quantitiesTwo lemons and one orange come to roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup and 1/3 cup respectively, depending on the fruit. Taste before freezing: cold dulls sweetness, so the unfrozen mix should taste slightly too sweet.
- White grape juiceThe unfermented bottled sort. Bottled unfermented grape juice was widely sold in America from the early twentieth century, and white grape juice is readily available today. Look for one without added sugar, or reduce the sugar to about 1/2 cup.
- Yield and servingAbout a quart, serving four to six in small glasses. Sherbets of this kind were often served mid-meal as a palate cleanser as much as for dessert; a scoop is enough.
- The garnishCandied orange peel goes limp fast on a frozen surface. Cut it into fine julienne and add at the table.
Orange pekoe is a leaf-grade term, not a flavour: it describes whole, unbroken black tea leaves of a particular size from the top of the shoot, and has nothing to do with oranges, though a cook picking a tea for a citrus sherbet could be forgiven for the association. Tea and fruit ices like this belong to the wide older category of sherbet, a word generally traced to the Arabic sharbat and reaching English by way of Turkish and Persian in the seventeenth century, first as the name for a cooling sweetened drink; the frozen or half-frozen water ice came later, and the milky American product later still. That this one leans on bottled white grape juice places it firmly in early twentieth-century American home cooking: unfermented grape juice was a staple of temperance-minded households and appears constantly in punches, gelatines and ices of the period, doing the work that wine would once have done.