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Grape Fruit Sorbet
Make a syrup of one quart of water, and one pint of sugar. To this add one and one-half cups of grape fruit juice and one-half cup of orange juice. When nearly frozen add bits of grape fruit pulp.
A plain water ice with no eggs, gelatine or cream to stabilize it, so the sugar concentration and the churning are the whole of the technique. The proportions given are sound; the equipment assumed is not.
- The syrup ratioOne quart water to one pint sugar is 4 cups water to 2 cups (about 14 oz) sugar. Boil until the sugar is fully dissolved, then chill completely before adding the juice — heating citrus juice dulls it.
- Sweetness will need adjustingGrapefruit varieties of the period were generally sharper and more bitter than today's Ruby Red and similar pink cultivars. Taste the finished mix cold; if it is already sweet, cut the syrup with a little more juice, since an over-sweet base freezes soft and slushy.
- Juice quantitiesOne and a half cups of grapefruit juice is roughly two large fruit; half a cup of orange juice is one to two oranges. Strain out the seeds and any coarse membrane, which turns bitter as it sits in syrup.
- "Nearly frozen"The original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed in ice and rock salt, where the mixture thickens to a heavy slush after roughly twenty to thirty minutes of cranking. In an ice-cream machine that is the point where the paddle leaves a visible track; in a shallow pan in the freezer, it is after two or three scrapings with a fork, roughly 90 minutes.
- The pulpAdd the grapefruit segments broken into small pieces and stripped of their white membranes, and only at the end. Added earlier they are pulverized by the dasher; added later they freeze into hard nuggets that never soften in the mouth.
- TextureWith no egg white or gelatine this sets hard in a modern freezer, and it was originally eaten soft, straight from the churn. Move it to the refrigerator for 15 minutes before serving, or stir in a tablespoon of vodka or kirsch before churning to keep it scoopable.
- YieldSomething over a quart and a half of finished ice — ten or so small servings. An ice of this kind was more likely intended as a palate cleanser between courses than as a dessert portion.
Sorbets and water ices sat in a specific place in the formal dinner of the period: a small, sharp, unsweetened-tasting ice served midway through a long meal to clear the palate before the roast. The Butterick Cook Book, published by the pattern company as part of its broad program of household instruction for middle-class women, includes recipes for them alongside the richer cream ices. Grapefruit is the telling ingredient here — it was still a comparative novelty in American kitchens at the turn of the century, moving out of Florida groves and onto northern tables as rail refrigeration improved, and it carried an air of the fashionable and slightly medicinal. Serving it as an ice, rather than halved with sugar at breakfast, marks the recipe as an ambitious one for its readership.