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Grape Sherbet
1 pint grape juice 1 cup sugar 1 quart milk Warm grape juice, and in it dissolve sugar; mix thoroughly with ice cold milk; freeze at once. This makes a lilac colored sherbet.
A milk sherbet rather than a water ice, and the entire success of it turns on temperature. Grape juice is acidic enough to curdle milk on contact if either is warm.
- The hinge: cold milk, immediate freezingChill the milk to refrigerator-cold or below, cool the sweetened grape juice to the same temperature, and pour the juice into the milk while stirring. Then get it into the machine at once. Letting the mix stand at room temperature risks grainy curds instead of a smooth lilac sherbet.
- QuantitiesA pint of grape juice is 2 cups; a quart of milk is 4 cups. Total volume is about 1.5 quarts of mix, which yields roughly 1.5 quarts of finished sherbet and serves eight.
- Why the juice is warmedOnly to dissolve the sugar. A brief warming over low heat is enough; the recipe then relies on ice-cold milk, though cooling the syrup first is the safer course.
- The grape juice to useUnsweetened bottled Concord grape juice is closest to what the book means. Grape juice cocktail and blends are already sweetened and will make the sherbet cloying at a full cup of sugar; taste the mix before freezing and adjust.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk gives the intended light, slightly icy texture. Cream makes it an ice cream, and its fat mutes the grape flavor. Skim milk freezes too hard.
- "Freeze at once"In a modern ice cream maker, churn 20 to 30 minutes until it holds soft peaks, then firm it in the freezer for an hour or two. With a hand-crank freezer, use a 3:1 ratio of crushed ice to rock salt.
- Texture on the second dayMilk sherbets with no egg, gelatin, or corn syrup set very hard. Let it stand 10 to 15 minutes at room temperature before scooping.
Milk sherbets like this one were one American answer to the problem of a cheap frozen dessert: no eggs to cook, no cream to buy, and a quart of milk stretched to serve eight. The word sherbet descends through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened drink, and in nineteenth-century English usage it could still mean a beverage as well as a frozen dish; the American shift toward the frozen sense was well underway by the time cookbooks like this one appeared. The choice of unfermented grape juice is worth noting: commercial bottled grape juice was promoted heavily in the United States from the late nineteenth century onward, with strong support from temperance circles, and by the 1900s it had become an ordinary pantry item rather than a novelty. The promised "lilac colored" result is a plain acknowledgment that purple grape juice plus milk gives pale violet, not deep grape.