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Grapes, Iced
Add 1 tablespoonful gelatin to a little cold water, and let it soak for about half an hour. Dissolve ¾ pound granulated sugar in 24 and boil about five minutes; then add the gelatin and let cool. When cool, add 1 pint grape juice. Freeze and when partly frozen, beat up and add whites of 2 eggs.
A soda-fountain grape sherbet, thickened with gelatin and lightened with beaten egg white. One element puts it out of reach today, and the rest is worth understanding on its own terms.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites of two eggs are beaten into a mixture that is already partly frozen and is never brought to any temperature at which Salmonella is killed. Freezing does not destroy the organism; it simply holds it. This is the reason the recipe should not be made as written, and a current sherbet or sorbet recipe should be used instead.
- The syrup quantity is incompleteThe instruction to dissolve the sugar "in 24" gives a number with no unit; a unit appears to have dropped out in printing. What was intended cannot be recovered, so the sugar-to-water ratio of the syrup is unknown.
- Gelatin then and nowA tablespoonful of granulated gelatin is somewhat more than one modern envelope (an envelope runs about 7 g, or a little over two teaspoons). The half-hour cold-water soak is the bloom; older gelatins were generally coarser and slower to hydrate.
- Why gelatin at allFountain ices had to survive time in a cabinet rather than be served the instant they came off the paddle. Gelatin holds water, slows the growth of ice crystals and keeps the sherbet from going grainy or weeping.
- Grape juiceThe pint called for is most likely unsweetened bottled Concord juice, dark and strongly musky, rather than a modern sweetened grape drink, though the recipe says only "grape juice." Any substitution changes the sugar balance of the syrup, which is already the part of the recipe most in doubt.
- "Partly frozen"The point at which the mixture is beaten is when it has thickened to a slush and no longer pours freely. In a hand-cranked freezer that is a matter of feel; the same stage in a modern machine comes well before the sherbet holds a shape.
- YieldWith the syrup volume unknown, the finished quantity can only be estimated; something in the region of two quarts, or eight to ten fountain portions, is plausible.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem to have treated the frozen department as something like an extension of the syrup department: the same fruit juices that went into a glass of soda were, it is often said, carried over into ices, sherbets and frappes so that nothing stood idle. Grape belonged squarely to that list, and the American grape of the fountain was the Concord, a native cultivar that came into wide commercial use in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose bottled unfermented juice was heavily promoted, partly on temperance grounds, as a wholesome alternative to wine. Sherbets of this type sit between an ice and an ice cream: no dairy, but body supplied by gelatin and beaten egg white, a formula generally thought to have been common in the trade before mechanical refrigeration made continuous churning and cold holding routine.