Home › Recipes › Turkish Sherbet
Turkish Sherbet
1 quart of port or any sweet wine. 1 quart of water. 2 pounds of sugar. 2 lemons--juice only. 6 oranges--juice only. 8 ounces of blanched almonds. 8 ounces of musca'el grapes. 4 ounces of figs cut small. 4 ounces of seedless raisins. 8 whites of eggs. Cloves and cinnamon, and little coloring. Make a hot syrup of the sugar and water and pour it over the raisins and figs and 6 cloves and a small piece of cinnamon in a bowl. When cool color pink, add the orange and lemon juice and wine, strain, and freeze it in the usual manner. Take out the spices and add the scalded raisins and figs and the grapes and almonds to the sherbet at last.
Collet, a French captain and refugee, made a small fortune in New York about the year 1815 by making ices and sherbets. Says the Chronicler: "The women in particular, never tired of this new pleasure, being especially astonished that they could be kept so cold at a summer heat of ninety degrees." If sherbets have any distinguishing feature in their composition at all it is the admixture of jelly, either calf's foot or geiatine, recommended by some to give smoothness to the drink and substance to the ice Mention has already been made of gelatine in ice cream. Either gelatine dissolved or finished table jelly can be added at option to the sherbets preceding, but in that case leave out the whites of eggs which are the substitute for calf's foot jelly. According the lexicographers the word punch is derived from East Indian pantsh, five, having reference to the five ingredients of punch--water, spirit, sugar, lemons and tea. But that is the old-fashioned punch to be drunk hot.
Roman punch is essentially a strong and good lemonade with rum in it and whipped whites of eggs, and frozen. But almost every one adds to it orange juice, wine or brandy or maraschino and sometimes spices and flavors. These are not essential ingredients but only individual fancies, but it results that there is nothing that cooks in hotels have to make that there are such various ideas about as the composition of Roman punch. Ag in, the caterers who have had the privilege of setting the fashions make other punches "a la Romaine," which are not Roman punch but are made in the same manner with white of eggs, or Italian meringue, (which is boiled icing and acts the same as the whites) and frozen. Rum punch becomes Roman punch by being put through the process just mentioned. The places where Roman punch, or something that passes for it is served with the dessert in place of ice cream are far more numerous than where it is served as a course between the entrees and the game.
A wine-based water ice from the era when hotel pastry departments turned out a frozen punch for every long dinner. The construction is sound, but one ingredient puts it outside what can be recommended today.
- Why the cautionEight raw egg whites go into the mix and the mixture is only ever chilled and churned, never heated. Nothing in the process brings the whites near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them. The dilute alcohol from a quart of wine spread through roughly three quarts of finished sherbet is nowhere near strong enough to matter.
- The scale of the exposureEight whites is a large dose of raw egg for a dessert intended to be eaten by a whole table, including the people least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. If you want a wine sherbet of this type, work from a current recipe that either cooks the whites into a syrup-based meringue or uses pasteurised whites.
- Muscatel grapes"Musca'el" is muscatel — here meaning large sweet muscat table grapes or, in period usage, the dried muscatel raisins sold on the stem. Either reading gives a chewy, perfumed fruit garnish rather than an ingredient in the base.
- "Freeze it in the usual manner"For this period this meant a hand-cranked pail freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. The fruit and nuts go in at the very end, presumably so they do not jam the dasher.
- Wine and freezing pointA quart of port in a base this size will keep the sherbet soft and slushy rather than firm. The author's own language -- "smoothness to the drink and substance to the ice" -- suggests something to be spooned or drunk rather than scooped.
- The gelatine noteThe passage after the method is the author's aside, not a step: gelatine or set table jelly was the alternative body-builder to egg white, inherited from calf's-foot jelly. He is explicit that the two are substitutes and should not both be used.
- Colouring"A little coloring" is unspecified; the instruction is simply to "color pink" once the syrup has cooled. It is cosmetic and can be left out entirely.
Frozen punches sat in the middle of the long nineteenth-century dinner as a pause between the entrées and the roast or game, and the American Pastry Cook's digression here shows how loosely the names were held: Roman punch, punch à la romaine and rum punch were all built on the same trick of folding whipped whites or boiled icing into a spirituous lemonade and freezing it. The derivation of punch from a Hindustani-Persian word for five, for the five ingredients, is the standard etymology of the period and is still the one usually given, though it has long been argued over. The Collet anecdote belongs to the wave of French émigrés who brought ices to American cities after the Revolution and the Saint-Domingue upheavals; confectioners with ice houses could sell cold as a novelty in a New York August, and the astonishment recorded by the chronicler is the honest reaction of customers who had no other way to get it. "Turkish" here is a nod to the Ottoman şerbet, a sweetened fruit drink, from which the whole family of European sherbets takes its name, dressed up with cloves, cinnamon, almonds, figs and raisins to look the part.