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Sicilian Sorbet
1 can peaches 1 cup sugar 2 cups orange juice 2 tablespoons lemon juice Press peaches through a sieve, add sugar and fruit juices. Freeze and serve. 4 cups water 2 cups sugar 1½ cups orange juice
A fruit ice with no dairy and no cooked syrup — one of the simplest things in the chapter, though the printed text has a flaw worth knowing about before you start.
- The recipe is two recipesThe trailing "4 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 1½ cups orange juice" has no method attached and almost certainly belongs to the recipe printed next to it, not to the sorbet. Work only from the first list: canned peaches, 1 cup sugar, 2 cups orange juice, 2 tablespoons lemon juice.
- "1 can peaches"The recipe gives no size or weight, as cookbooks of the period often did not; a large can yielding roughly two cups of sieved fruit is the sensible reading. If you use fruit packed in juice or water rather than syrup, expect a less sweet, icier result.
- Freeze means churn"Freeze and serve" meant a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, turned until the paddle stiffened. In an ice cream machine, churn 20–30 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Sugar is structureThe single cup of sugar is not only for sweetness — it keeps the mixture from setting into a solid brick. Reducing it noticeably will give you something you have to chip at rather than scoop.
- Strain the orange juiceTwo cups is four to six oranges. Pass it through a sieve; pulp and membrane freeze into gritty flecks that are obvious in a mixture this plain.
- Yield and servingThe listed quantities come to around five cups of mixture before churning, so rather more than a quart; six to eight small servings. Serve it directly from the churn while still soft; if it has been hardened in the freezer, let it stand 10 minutes and it will scoop cleanly.
"Sorbet" in the American cookbooks of this era usually meant a fruit ice served midway through a long dinner rather than a dessert — a palate cleanser between the heavy courses, sometimes spiked with liqueur or served in glasses at the table. The ices chapters of such books are full of these distinctions: water ices, sherbets, frappés, punches and sorbets shade into one another and the names were used loosely even then. The "Sicilian" tag is decorative, invoking Sicily's long association with citrus and with ices generally — the island is often credited in food writing with an early tradition of chilled fruit ices, though the naming here says more about turn-of-the-century menu French and Italian than about any specific Sicilian dish. What is genuinely of its moment is the can of peaches: by 1900 commercial canning had made a fruit ice possible in February, and cookbooks began calling for canned goods by the can rather than by weight.