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Pineapple Sherbet
Soak a tablespoonful of gelatine in a couple of tablespoonfuls of cold water for two hours; peel a large pineapple, cut out the eyes and discolored parts and chop fine, mixing with it two breakfast cupfuls of caster-sugar. Dissolve the soaked gelatine in half a pint of boiling water, then stir this and half a pint of cold water in with the pineapple; pour the whole preparation into a freezer and freeze. When done, the should be white and creamy.
A gelatine-set water ice from the Waldorf's kitchen, written for a hand-cranked freezer and a cook who knew what a breakfast cup held. Two things need attention before you start: the enzyme in raw pineapple, and the vagueness of the measures.
- Raw pineapple versus gelatineFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that digests gelatine and will leave the mixture loose and watery no matter how long it churns. Heating the chopped fruit and its juice to a simmer for a few minutes before combining deactivates the enzyme; canned or cooked pineapple has already been heat-treated and poses no problem.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup was a large cup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so two of caster sugar works out at roughly 14 oz to 1 lb 2 oz. The quantity is genuinely imprecise; start at about a pound of caster sugar and taste the base before freezing, since ripeness varies enormously.
- Half a pintIn this American book a pint is 16 fluid ounces, so each half pint is one cup. Total added liquid is two cups; the fruit is given only as 'a large pineapple', so the proportion of pulp to liquid is left to the cook.
- The gelatineA tablespoon of granulated gelatine is around 9 to 10 g, rather more than one modern quarter-ounce envelope (about 7 g); reckon on one and a half envelopes. If you use leaf gelatine, four or five sheets is the usual equivalent. Its job here is body, not set; the sherbet should never be firm enough to slice.
- "A freezer"This means an ice-and-rock-salt bucket churn, not the compartment in your refrigerator. Any modern ice cream machine works; expect 20 to 30 minutes of churning, then two to three hours in the freezer to firm up.
- Getting it white and creamyThe pale colour comes from air beaten in during churning. If the mixture is stirred only occasionally in a tray it will freeze coarse and icy rather than creamy. Chill the base thoroughly, to refrigerator temperature at least, before it goes into the machine.
- YieldSomewhere around a quart and a half, depending on the size of the pineapple and the cup, giving eight to ten small portions served in glasses. A sherbet of this kind was customarily passed between courses rather than served as dessert.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 volume, was not strictly a cook, but the book records what the Waldorf's kitchens sent out, and a sherbet like this one belonged to the middle of a long dinner rather than the end of it: a cold, sharp pause between the heavy courses. The word itself came into English directly from Turkish and Persian in the seventeenth century, and the earliest sherbets were sweetened fruit syrups served chilled. Pineapple was arriving in quantity from Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida by the 1890s. The gelatine is a mark of the period too: commercially granulated gelatine had only recently become cheap and reliable enough for domestic and hotel use, and cooks who had once clarified calf's foot stock for the purpose were quick to adopt it as a way of giving frozen water ices a smoother, less icy body.