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Pomegranate Sherbet
Two dozen blood oranges, 4 quarts water, 4 quarts simple syrup. Peel the oranges and remove the seeds before pressing out the juice. You will thus obtain a fine flavor with none of the bitter taste of the rind. This is a fine confection, but the lack of blood oranges is against it for a regular thing. Freeze as an ice.
A soda-fountain batch, written for a hand-cranked freezer and a bar that sold ice by the glass. The proportions are sound but the volume is enormous, and the syrup strength is the one figure the original leaves vague.
- Scale it down firstAs written this yields roughly ten quarts — two and a half gallons of finished sherbet. A tenth of the recipe (about two to three blood oranges, 1 1/2 cups water, 1 1/2 cups syrup) fits a home machine.
- "Simple syrup" at the fountain was heavy"Simple syrup" at the fountain was heavier -- druggists' and dispensary syrup of the period commonly ran to roughly two parts sugar to one part water by weight, rather than the 1:1 syrup usually meant by the phrase today. With a 1:1 syrup the mix will be thinner and will freeze harder and icier; on the heavier syrup the finished sugar works out somewhere near 28 to 30 percent.
- Check the mix by taste, not by faithBefore freezing, the liquid should taste distinctly too sweet at room temperature. Cold mutes sweetness sharply, and an under-sugared sherbet sets into a solid block rather than a scoopable one.
- Juice yieldTwo dozen blood oranges give roughly a quart and a half to two quarts of juice, set against the eight quarts of water and syrup. Judge your scaled-down batch by juice volume rather than fruit count, since orange size varies widely.
- Why seeds and peel come out firstThe instruction is the hinge of the recipe. Pressing whole fruit drives peel oil and seed bitterness into the juice, and both survive freezing; a reamer or citrus press on halved, seeded fruit keeps the flavor clean.
- "Freeze as an ice"That means churned in a freezer with an ice-and-salt jacket, not still-frozen in a tray. Any modern ice cream machine does the same job; churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then firm it in the freezer for an hour or two.
- Blood oranges nowThe author's complaint about supply no longer holds — Moro and Tarocco oranges are sold from roughly December through April. Out of season, the recipe simply cannot be made with the same color.
Fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often named a drink or ice for its color rather than its contents, which may well explain a pomegranate sherbet made entirely of blood oranges: the deep red juice matched the shade customers associated with grenadine, a syrup whose name comes from the French grenade, pomegranate. The recipe also shows the economics of the counter. A dispenser bought sugar syrup by the gallon and water was free, so a citrus ice was built as juice diluted into syrup, in batches sized for a day's trade. The author's aside that the scarcity of blood oranges is "against it for a regular thing" reads as a working note to a fellow tradesman: a fountain item available only part of the year was presumably not worth listing on the board.