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Lemon Sherbet
Pare one lemon thin, and squeeze in the rind of two, taking care to keep back the pips. Mix with it four tablespoonfuls of loaf sugar and one breakfast cupful of water. When the sugar has dissolved pour in two breakfast cupfuls of water. Strain and use. It may be iced or not, as desired.
This is a sherbet in the older sense: a sweetened lemon drink, not a frozen dessert. It comes together in minutes and lives or dies on how you handle the zest.
- Pare thin, and mean it"Pare one lemon thin" means removing the coloured zest with as little as possible of the white pith beneath. Pith is bitter, and there is nothing here to mask it.
- The breakfast cupA breakfast cup is the large morning cup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treating it as a standard 8 oz cup gives 3 cups of finished drink and is close enough for a sugar syrup.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a moulded cone, the whitest sugar available at the time. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct descendant; four tablespoons is about 50 g.
- An ambiguous line"Squeeze in the rind of two" most likely means the juice of two lemons, with the rinds squeezed out over the bowl. Two lemons yield roughly 1/4 cup of juice, which suits this quantity of sugar.
- Dissolve before dilutingThe order matters: sugar goes into one cup of water only, so it dissolves in a concentrated syrup, then the remaining two cups thin it. Adding all the water at once makes the sugar slower to dissolve.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve to catch zest, pulp and any pips. Seeds left in contact with the liquid contribute the same bitterness as pith.
- Yield and servingAbout 3 cups, enough for two tall glasses or four small ones. Chill it rather than pouring it over a mountain of ice, which dilutes it back past the point of tasting like anything.
The word comes through Turkish şerbet from Arabic sharbāt, a sweetened fruit drink, and it reached English in the seventeenth century as the name of a cooling beverage long before it meant anything frozen; sorbet is the same word by way of French and Italian. Through the nineteenth century English and American cookbooks kept both senses side by side, so a book could carry a lemon sherbet you drank and a lemon ice you spooned. Oscar Tschirky's collection, drawn from Waldorf practice in the 1890s, includes a number of these simple lemonades, orangeades and sherbets. The instruction that it "may be iced or not, as desired" leaves the choice to the cook.