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Orange Sherbet
Put a tablespoonful of gelatine in a little cold water to soak, and then pour over one breakfast cupful of boiling water to dissolve it. Turn it into a basin with the juice of ten large oranges, and add two breakfast cupfuls of sugar, and three of water. Mix well and when quite cold it is ready for use. The juice of a lemon may be added if the oranges are too sweet.
Oscar gives the syrup but not the freezing, which in a 1896 hotel kitchen went without saying: the mixture went into a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Treat this as a base to be churned, not a jelly to be chilled.
- "Ready for use" means ready to freezeThe finished liquid is a sherbet base. Churn it in an ice cream machine until it holds soft ridges, then firm it in the freezer for two to three hours. Left unfrozen it simply sets into a weak orange jelly.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is the large morning cup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Read it as a standard 8 oz cup throughout and the proportions hold: 2 cups sugar to roughly 4 cups water plus the juice.
- Juice of ten large orangesAbout 3 to 3 1/2 cups of juice, depending on the fruit. Strain out pulp and seeds before mixing; pulp turns fibrous and stringy once frozen.
- The gelatineOne tablespoon is roughly one and a third envelopes of modern powdered gelatine. Use one envelope (7 g). It is there for body and to keep the ice crystals fine, not to set the mixture.
- Dissolve it properlyBloom the gelatine in a few tablespoons of cold water for five minutes, then pour on the cup of boiling water and stir until no grains remain. Adding it to cold juice undissolved leaves rubbery threads in the finished sherbet.
- Sugar and textureTwo cups of sugar in roughly seven cups of liquid is not extravagant for a sherbet; sugar lowers the freezing point and is what keeps the result scoopable rather than a solid block. Cutting it much below this gives an icy, hard result.
- The lemon is not optional in practiceThe lemon is worth adding -- The recipe leaves it optional, to be used only if the oranges are too sweet, but the juice of one lemon, and often two, is what keeps the sherbet tasting of orange rather than of sugar.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, serving ten to twelve as a course sherbet in small glasses.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and a sherbet like this one was rarely dessert. In the long menus of the 1890s a frozen fruit ice arrived midway through the meal, after the entrées and before the roast, as a punctuation mark meant to refresh the palate — the same office filled by the more elaborate spiked versions such as Roman punch. The gelatine has a practical purpose: ices were frozen in a pail packed with ice and rock salt and then held in a lined chest, and a little gelatine kept them smooth through the hours between churning and service. The distinction between sherbet, sorbet and water ice was loose then and remains so; in American usage sherbet came to mean the softer, slightly enriched kind, which is roughly what this recipe produces.