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Apricot Sherbet
Three quarts ripe apricots, 3 quarts of water, 8 pounds of icing sugar, 1 ounce citric acid solution. Press the apricots through a colander, and add the other ingredients.
This is a soda fountain syrup, not a frozen dessert: apricot pulp, sugar and acid, drawn an ounce or two at a time and finished with carbonated water. The batch is sized for a commercial fountain and scales down cleanly.
- Scale it down firstAs written this yields roughly two gallons of concentrate. Divide by eight for home use: 1.5 cups apricot pulp, 1.5 cups water, 1 lb sugar, and acid to taste.
- Icing sugarIn fountain usage this means finely powdered sugar, chosen because it dissolves without heating. Modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, which will cloud the syrup; superfine (caster) sugar dissolves nearly as fast and stays clear.
- The citric acid is unmeasurable as givenFountain manuals sold "citric acid solution" at various strengths, and this book does not say which it means. Treat the ounce as a starting point only and add acid a little at a time until the syrup tastes bright rather than sour.
- Press means pressA colander, not a sieve. Halve and pit the apricots and work them through with the back of a ladle so some pulp goes into the syrup; the fibre and body are the point. Three quarts of fruit is about 4 lb whole.
- No cooking, so no keepingNothing here is heated, and sugar alone will not hold raw fruit pulp. Refrigerate the finished syrup and use it inside three or four days, or freeze it in portions.
- Serving at the glassFigure 1.5 to 2 oz of syrup in a tall glass, filled with cold soda water and stirred once. The same syrup will churn into an actual sherbet if you want one, though the sugar is high enough that it freezes soft.
- Ripeness carries the flavourThere is no cooking step to concentrate anything, so underripe apricots give a thin, flat syrup. Use fruit soft enough to bruise under a thumb.
"Sherbet" at the turn-of-the-century American soda fountain often meant a fruit syrup, usually acidulated, to be dispensed with carbonated water — closer to the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, than to the frozen ice the word now names in English. Fountain formularies of this kind were trade manuals: the dispenser bought citric acid by the pound and kept a row of labelled syrup pumps, and the added tartness cut the heavy sugar load. Apricots were a seasonal crop in this period, with California the main American source. The recipe's brevity is characteristic — it assumes a reader who already knows the strength of his own acid solution and the size of his own syrup jars.