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Pineapple Sherbet (One tablespoonful gelatin)
One tablespoonful gelatin, soaked in one cup cold water 15 minutes. Diss solve with 1 cup boiling water. Take ½ can grated pineapple and 1½ cups sugar, juice of 1 lemon. Add strained gelatin, put in freezer and pack with ice and salt and freeze.
A soda-fountain sherbet from the era when gelatin, not egg white or cream, was what kept an ice smooth. It works as written, but the measurements assume vessels and can sizes that no longer exist.
- The gelatin is the whole pointThe tablespoon of gelatin is not a garnish — it is what stops the ice freezing into a solid block in a hand-crank freezer. Bloom it fully in the cold water before adding the boiling water, and strain it as directed; undissolved granules make gritty threads in the finished sherbet.
- How much gelatin that isA level tablespoon is about 3 teaspoons, so roughly one and a third envelopes of modern powdered unflavoured gelatin (each envelope is 2¼ teaspoons, ¼ oz). Rounding down to one envelope gives a softer, icier result.
- "Half a can" is genuinely ambiguousCanned grated pineapple came in several sizes in this period; a No. 2 can held about 20 oz, so half is roughly 1 to 1¼ cups with its syrup. Anywhere in that range works — start at 1 cup and taste, since the syrup contributes sweetness on top of the sugar.
- Canned, not freshUse canned or otherwise cooked pineapple. Raw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and will leave the mixture permanently loose; canning heat destroys it.
- The freezer"Put in freezer" means a hand-crank or electric churn, not the freezer compartment. Pack the bucket in crushed ice with rock salt at roughly 8 parts ice to 1 part salt and churn until it holds a ribbon, about 20-30 minutes.
- Chill before churningThe recipe skips this, but the base has been hit with a cup of boiling water. Cool it thoroughly — refrigerator cold — before it goes into the churn, or the ice and salt will exhaust themselves before the mixture sets.
- SweetnessA cup and a half of sugar in roughly a quart of base is high by modern dessert standards, and deliberately so: sugar depresses the freezing point and keeps a fruit ice scoopable. Cutting it much below a cup gives a hard, crystalline result.
- YieldA generous quart or more, six to eight modest fountain servings. Best eaten within a day or so; gelatin-set ices tend to toughen after a long stretch in a hard freeze.
The instructions are clipped in the way trade recipes often are — the reader was assumed to own an ice-and-salt freezer and to know his can sizes. Gelatin-set fruit sherbets belong to the period when commercially packaged granulated gelatin had become cheap and reliable, making it easy to give a water ice body without cream or eggs, both of which spoiled quickly. Canned pineapple, grated and packed in syrup, was one of the great new convenience ingredients of the same decades, and it turns up constantly in such recipes because it delivered consistent flavour and sugar year-round from a shelf. The result was cheap to produce and brightly flavoured, sitting somewhere between the ice creams and the plain fruit ices.