Home › At the Fountain › Grape Sherbet
Grape Sherbet
This never fails to make trade. One ounce granulated gelatin, 1 quart syrup, 4 quarts water, the beaten whites of 2 eggs, the juice of 1 quart milk, 3 pints American Unfermented Grape , add the rest of the gelatin in 1 quart of hot water, using double boiler, add the rest of water, stir in the other ingredients and freeze hard. Serve in a sherbet glass with a spoon.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe, and the text as printed is partly garbled. Two things stand in the way of making it today: the raw egg whites and the missing steps.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe beaten whites of two eggs go into a mixture that is chilled and frozen and nothing else. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it merely holds it. A current sherbet or sorbet recipe, using pasteurised whites or none at all, should be used instead.
- The text is corrupt"The juice of 1 quart milk" is not a coherent instruction, and "add the rest of the gelatin" appears before any gelatin has been divided. Something has dropped out in typesetting. The proportions cannot be reconstructed with confidence, which is a second reason not to work from this page.
- Syrup means fountain syrupA quart of "syrup" here is most likely the plain sugar syrup kept as fountain stock, not maple or corn syrup. Its exact strength cannot be fixed from the text, but it supplies nearly all the sweetness in the batch.
- Granulated gelatinAn ounce of granulated gelatin is about four of today's quarter-ounce envelopes. Here it is dissolved in hot water over a double boiler; gelatin in a frozen sherbet is a body agent, holding the texture soft against ice crystals rather than setting it.
- American Unfermented GrapeShorthand for bottled unfermented grape juice of the kind sold to temperance households and soda fountains, such products commonly being made from Concord grapes. Ordinary purple grape juice is the direct descendant.
- ScaleOne quart of syrup, four quarts of water and three pints of juice comes to about six and a half quarts, a little over a gallon and a half before freezing: fountain volume, meant for a batch freezer and a day's trade, not a home machine.
Soda fountains of the 1890s and 1900s ran on a trade in frozen sweets as much as in carbonated drinks, and manuals like this one were written for the dispenser behind the marble counter, in gallons and quarts, with a note on what would "make trade" rather than what would please a family. Unfermented grape juice was central to that world. Pasteurised grape juice is generally traced to Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist dentist in Vineland, New Jersey, who bottled it in 1869 as a communion wine substitute; by the turn of the century it had become a temperance drink in its own right, and the fountain was the respectable public alternative to the saloon. A grape sherbet built on syrup, gelatin and bottled juice was cheap, keeping, purple enough to be noticed in the glass, and entirely free of alcohol, which was most of the point.