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Lemon Sherbet
One pint lemon juice, 1½ glass orange juice, 3 quarts water, 2 ounces gelatine. Soak gelatine over night in ½ pint water; in the morning add the rest of the water and let come to a boiling point. Strain fruit juice and add with 2 cups sugar, or sugar to taste, and freeze.
A large-format water ice from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, stabilized with gelatine rather than egg white or a cooked syrup. Nearly everything about it scales down cleanly, but two things need attention: the gelatine and the sugar.
- Chill it completely before freezingThe gelatine liquid must be cold — refrigerator cold — before the fruit juice goes in and the mixture is churned. Adding acidic juice to hot liquid weakens the set, and warm mixture in a freezer canister produces coarse, grainy ice.
- YieldJust over a gallon of finished sherbet, enough for 25 or 30 servings. Quartering the recipe (½ cup lemon juice, 3 cups water, ½ oz gelatine, ½ cup sugar) fits a domestic 1½-quart machine.
- "1½ glass" is not a fixed measureA tumbler in this period ran anywhere from 6 to 8 fluid ounces, so read this as roughly 1 to 1½ cups of orange juice. It is a flavoring here, not structural, so the imprecision does no harm.
- GelatineTwo ounces is about eight ¼-oz envelopes of modern granulated gelatine. Period gelatine was sold in several forms — sheets, shreds and granules — and was less consistent in strength than today's product; if your sherbet sets rubbery rather than soft, cut the gelatine by a third next time.
- Overnight soaking is optionalThe long soak reflects the coarser gelatine of the period, which needed extended hydration. Granulated gelatine blooms in 5 to 10 minutes in cold water, then dissolves when the rest of the water is heated. Bring it just to the boiling point as written and no further — prolonged boiling weakens the set.
- Sugar is genuinely lowTwo cups of sugar in a gallon of liquid gives a very lean, sharp ice that freezes rock-hard and scoops badly. Modern water ices run closer to 20 percent sugar by weight; expect to use 4 to 5 cups for the full batch. The recipe's "or sugar to taste" is an invitation to do exactly that.
- LemonsA pint of juice means roughly 10 to 12 lemons. Strain as directed — pulp and membrane give the finished sherbet a fibrous texture.
- StorageGelatine-stabilized ices firm up hard in a modern freezer. Let it stand 10 minutes at room temperature before serving.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period meant a fruit-juice ice, thinner and sharper than ice cream and served either as a dessert or between courses of a long dinner; the word comes through Turkish şerbet and Persian sharbat from the Arabic sharba, a drink. Gelatine as a stabilizer became common around the turn of the twentieth century, as packaged gelatine grew cheap and reliable enough for ordinary households and cooks used it to keep water ices smooth in the hand-cranked freezer, where a plain juice-and-sugar mixture tended to freeze into shards. The quantities here — a pint of lemon juice, three quarts of water — point to a church supper, a lodge social or a large family dinner rather than a weeknight.