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Pineapple Sorbet
11½ cups orange juice 1/2 cup lemon juice 1 quart Appollinaris -1 can grated pineapple or 1 pineapple shredded Prepare and freeze same as Pineapple Frappé.
A cross-reference recipe: Farmer assumes you have just read Pineapple Frappé on the same page and will borrow its method and its sugar. Read it as a flavour formula rather than a complete set of instructions.
- The orange juice quantity is a misprint"11½ cups" cannot be right against a half cup of lemon juice and a quart of water; the intended figure is almost certainly 1½ cups. Scale to the proportions of the frappé it points to rather than trusting the printed number.
- No sugar is listedPresumably because the cross-referenced Pineapple Frappé supplies it. That recipe is not reproduced here, so its sugar quantity and method cannot be confirmed from this page. Sweeten to taste; an unsweetened fruit mixture will freeze hard and sour.
- ApollinarisA German sparkling mineral water, heavily bottled and sold in the United States around 1900 and called for in several recipes in this book. Any plain sparkling water works; the carbonation is largely lost in freezing, so still water is no disaster.
- Canned grated pineappleThe period product was packed in its own juice or a light syrup. Crushed pineapple, drained of about half its liquid, is the closest modern match. If using fresh, "shredded" means grated on the coarse side of a box grater, core discarded.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatine do not mixRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine. It matters only if you are tempted to stabilise the sorbet; canned pineapple has been heated and the enzyme is dead.
- Freezing as a frappéA frappé is frozen to a coarse, granular slush, not smooth like ice cream. In a churn, stop while it is still spoonable and grainy. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every thirty minutes for three or four hours.
- Yield and serviceTaking the orange juice as 1½ cups, the liquids alone come to six cups before the pineapple and any sugar, so nearer two quarts than a quart and a half. Ices of this kind were served in small glasses between courses rather than as dessert.
Farmer's ices chapter distinguishes carefully between water ices, frappés, sherbets and sorbets, categories that have since collapsed into one another in ordinary American usage. The sorbet was a fruit ice meant to be handed round mid-meal to clear the palate, a fashion borrowed from French service and much admired in the well-off Boston households the Boston Cooking School trained cooks for. The reliance on Apollinaris, a bottled German sparkling water then widely advertised in America, marks the recipe as belonging to an era when imported mineral water was a sign of a well-stocked house. Canned grated pineapple is another period marker: tinned pineapple reached New England kitchens far more reliably than the fresh fruit did.