Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Kirsch Sherbet
Kirsch Sherbet
Mix one quart of syrup at 35 degrees with the same quantity of chablis, and pass it through a silk sieve into a freezer. Beat well with a spoon, and when well frozen add one-half teacupful of kirsch, mix again, put into the glasses, and serve.
A wine sorbet of the sort served between courses at the Waldorf, written for a cook who owned a saccharometer and a crank freezer. Two numbers in it need translating before you start.
- Syrup at 35 degreesThat is 35 degrees Baumé, read on a syrup hydrometer, not a temperature. It works out to roughly 65 percent sugar by weight, about two parts sugar to one part water by weight, boiled just until dissolved and cooled.
- Why the density mattersEqual parts 35° syrup and wine lands the finished base somewhere in the high teens on the Baumé scale, in the general range used for churned sorbets. Weaker syrup gives you a block of ice; stronger and it never sets.
- Silk sieveA fine-mesh conical strainer or a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job. The point is to remove any undissolved sugar or wine sediment that would read as grit.
- Freezer and "beat well with a spoon"The freezer is a hand-crank ice-and-salt churn; the spoon work is scraping and agitating the freezing mass so it stays smooth. A modern ice cream machine handles both, and a still-frozen pan needs a fork through it every twenty minutes.
- Half a teacupful of kirschPeriod teacup measures varied, commonly somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so figure roughly 2 to 3 fl oz. Kirsch is a dry, unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie, not a sweet cherry liqueur; the two are not interchangeable here.
- Add the spirit lastThis is the hinge. Alcohol lowers the freezing point, so kirsch stirred into the base at the start will keep the sherbet slushy. It goes in once the mixture has already set.
- The chablisA dry white from northern Burgundy. Any crisp dry white with real acidity works; anything oaked or off-dry throws the balance off.
- Texture and yieldTwo quarts of base is a large quantity, well over a dozen small intermezzo portions. It will never freeze hard because of the wine and spirit, so serve it soon after churning in chilled glasses.
Oscar Tschirky's book catches the American hotel dining room at the height of the long French service menu, where a wine ice arrived midway through the meal to reset the palate before the roast. Kirschwasser, a clear cherry brandy generally traced to the Black Forest and the neighbouring Swiss and Alsatian cherry country, was one of the usual flavourings for such ices, alongside rum and maraschino. The instruction to measure syrup in degrees Baumé rather than cups marks the recipe as professional writing: a hotel pastry department kept a saccharometer and weighed its sugar.