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American Sherbet
Secure some tin moulds to imitate high-shaped wineglasses, fill them with pure cold water, close them securely, and pack them in pounded ice. In the meantime mix in equal quantities some fruit syrup, wine and orange or lemon juice; almost any kind of fruit syrup may be used. Pour the mixture into a freezing-pot and work it well until frozen. The sherbet must not be frozen too firmly, yet it must be consistent enough to be piled up in pyramids in the ice glasses. When the water has frozen enough to take the form of the moulds, turn it out carefully, drain out any liquid that has not frozen, and fill up the ice glasses with the frozen syrup, piling it up high. Stand the glasses on a fancy dish and pass them round. If desired, the water may be colored before being frozen in the moulds, and a different color may be used in almost every mould; this will have a very pretty effect when served.
Two separate operations are going on here: making hollow cups out of frozen water, and churning a soft wine sherbet to pile into them. The cups are the harder half.
- The hinge: catch the ice glasses mid-freezeThe mould is filled with plain water and left in the ice until a shell has frozen against the metal, but the middle is still liquid. Turn it out and pour the unfrozen core away and you are left with a cup. Leave it too long and you have a solid lump of ice with no hollow at all, so check every fifteen or twenty minutes.
- "Packed in pounded ice"Crushed ice alone will not go below 32F. The moulds want a packing of crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt by volume, which drops the bath well below freezing. A modern freezer set to 0F does the same job with less mess, though more slowly.
- The freezing-potThis is a pot freezer or sorbetière: a metal canister set in an ice-and-salt bucket and scraped by hand or by crank. Any ice cream machine replaces it. "Work it well" means keep the mixture moving so it stays smooth rather than granular.
- Equal quantities of three thingsEqual parts fruit syrup, wine and citrus juice is a very tart, very boozy mix. A cup of each makes about a pint and a half of sherbet, enough for six small glasses. Fortified or sweet wines (sherry, Madeira, a sweet white) suit it better than a dry table wine.
- Why it will not set hardAlcohol and a heavy sugar load both depress the freezing point, so a mixture like this will not take a firm set; the recipe in any case wants it soft enough to pile up. Expect the texture of a slushy sorbet. If it refuses to hold a shape at all, cut the wine back and lengthen the syrup.
- Fruit syrupIn this period the term generally meant strained fruit juice boiled with sugar to a syrup rather than a modern bottled soda syrup. Simmering roughly equal weights of fruit and sugar and straining gives something close.
- Colouring the waterA drop or two of food colouring in the mould water is all that is needed. Use the least you can; heavily tinted ice looks muddy once the sherbet is piled in.
- ServingIce cups melt fast in a warm room. Assemble them straight from the freezer onto a chilled platter, and serve at once. The glasses are meant to be looked at and abandoned, not drunk from.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel in 1893 and published his cook book in 1896, at the height of the American hotel dining room's ambition. Sherbets of this kind were generally served not as dessert but as a mid-meal course to clear the palate before the roast. Serving them in vessels moulded or carved from ice was a familiar display device of the period, part of the same repertoire as swans and pedestals cut from block ice by the hotel's ice carvers.