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Sherbets Made with Gelatine
Soak one tablespoon of gelatine in a half-cup of cold water twenty minutes; add a half-cup of boiling water and stir till dissolved; then a cup of sugar and a cup of cold water and the strained juice of any fruit, and freeze. For orange, the strained juice of six oranges. Lemon, six lemons. Pineapple, one pint of the fresh fruit. Raspberry, and strawberry, a pint of the fruit juice mixed and the juice of two lemons.
CAFÉ FRAPPÉ-To the white of one egg slightly beaten, add one-half cup of cold water and one-half cup of ground coffee. Place this in a hot coffee-pot and pour over it one quart of boiling water. Boil two minutes, then stand where it will infuse. After ten minutes, strain, add one cup of sugar and cool. Freeze with equal parts of salt and ice. Serve in tall thin glasses with whipped cream.
Two recipes share this entry: a master formula for gelatine-set fruit sherbets, and a frozen coffee to finish a dinner. Both assume a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt.
- Fresh pineapple is the trapRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine and will leave the sherbet slushy rather than smooth. Bring the pineapple juice to a simmer for a minute or two and cool it before combining, or the gelatine does nothing at all.
- The gelatineOne tablespoon of granulated gelatine is about a third more than one modern 1/4-oz envelope (which measures about 2 1/4 teaspoons). Use one envelope plus about three-quarters of a teaspoon. Sheet gelatine at roughly 3 to 4 sheets to the envelope also works.
- Dissolve, do not boilThe half-cup of boiling water poured onto the bloomed gelatine should dissolve it completely with stirring; hold it up to the light and check for undissolved grains. Gelatine held at a rolling boil loses setting strength.
- Salt and ice proportions"Equal parts of salt and ice" is a very aggressive brine that freezes hard and fast, giving a coarse grain. For a churned sherbet, one part rock salt to four to six parts crushed ice is the usual modern ratio. In an electric machine, churn 20-30 minutes; in a shallow pan in the freezer, stir hard every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Fruit juice quantityThe formula gives no fixed volume for the juice, only examples. Six oranges yield roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups, six lemons roughly 1 cup; with a cup of sugar and 2 cups of water, expect somewhat more than a quart of finished sherbet, serving six. Lemon at this strength is sharp, and you may want another half cup of sugar.
- Café frappé strengthCaf":A9 frappé strength -- A half cup of ground coffee to a quart of water is a full-strength brew, which suits a drink that freezing and whipped cream will mute. The beaten egg white is a clarifier: it coagulates and carries the grounds and fines out with it, and the two-minute boil sets it. It is cooked through, not raw.
- Brewing the coffeeBoiling coffee for two minutes tastes bitter and scorched by current standards. Bringing it just to the boil, pulling it off, and giving it the full ten-minute infusion gives the same clarified result without the harshness.
- Frappé textureWith sugar but no gelatine or dairy, the coffee freezes to a coarse granita. Churn it only until slushy, or freeze in a pan and rake with a fork; frozen solid it becomes a block. Serve in chilled tall glasses.
Gelatine sherbets belong to the moment when gelatine stopped being a kitchen project and became a package. Through most of the nineteenth century a cook wanting jelly boiled down calves' feet or bought sheets of isinglass; by the 1890s granulated gelatine was on grocery shelves in America, and cookbooks filled up with recipes that assumed it. In an ice, gelatine does the work that egg yolk or cream does in an ice-cream: it holds water in suspension so the mixture freezes to a fine grain instead of a sheet of ice, which mattered enormously when the only freezer was a wooden bucket of salt and ice turned by hand. The egg-clarified coffee in the second half of the entry is older and quite separate, a method long common in American church and camp cooking, where a beaten white was the reliable way to get clear coffee out of a pot with no filter. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the household market, collected both as a matter of course; the frappé served in tall thin glasses with whipped cream is the period's idea of a fashionable finish to a dinner.