Home › At the Fountain › Strawberry Sherbet
Strawberry Sherbet
Three-quarters ounce granulated gelatin, 4 quarts water, i quart plain syrup, the juice of 6 lemons, 1 quart milk, 1½ pints crushed strawberries. Dissolve the gelatin in 1 quart boiling water, add the rest of the water cold, and the other ingredients, except the fruit. Put in freezer and freeze till almost hard, then add the fruit and freeze hard. Can also be made any fruit flavor desired.
This is a soda-fountain formula scaled for a shop, not a household: as written it yields roughly six and a half quarts. Halve or quarter it before you begin, and expect to work in an ice-and-salt freezer or a machine with a large bowl.
- The fruit and syrup quantitiesThe fruit quantity reads 1½ pints crushed strawberries, which matches the printed page. The syrup line still appears as "i quart plain syrup"; read it as 1 quart.
- Plain syrupFountain shorthand for a plain sugar syrup kept in bulk at the counter. The proportions vary from formula to formula, from roughly equal parts sugar and water to considerably heavier syrups, so the sugar in a quart cannot be pinned down exactly.
- Granulated gelatinThree-quarters of an ounce is about three envelopes of modern powdered gelatin. Soften it in a little cold water first, then dissolve in the boiling quart; dumping dry powder into hot water leaves rubbery threads that will not melt out.
- Add the acid last and coldSix lemons' juice into a quart of milk will curdle it on contact if the mixture is warm. Chill the gelatin-and-water base thoroughly, stir in the milk, then the juice, and keep everything cold until it goes into the freezer. Slight graininess is normal in a fountain sherbet of this kind.
- "Put in freezer"Here that means the hand-crank churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one of salt. In a modern machine, churn until it holds a soft mound.
- Why the fruit goes in lateCrushed berries added at the start would be shredded by the dasher and would bleed their colour into a uniform pink. Folded in near the end, they stay as identifiable pieces of fruit suspended in the ice.
- RipeningPacking churned ices down in a covered container to firm and mellow for an hour or two before serving was usual practice, though this recipe stops at "freeze hard."
- YieldThe full recipe serves upwards of forty as a fountain portion of about half a cup. A quarter batch is a sensible domestic size.
Sherbet in the American fountain trade meant something specific: a fruit ice carried on syrup and water, with a little milk and a stabiliser to keep the texture short of icy. Gelatin was one of the body-builders in use before commercial stabiliser blends, and it is doing here what egg white or gum tragacanth did in other formulas of the period. The presence of milk is what separated sherbet from a plain water ice. Recipes like this one were written for a dispenser working from a slate of interchangeable flavours, which is why it closes by inviting any fruit at all: the base is the product, the strawberry merely the day's variation.