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Strawberry Sherbet
Remove the stems from one pound or so of strawberries, mash the fruit, mix with it the juice of a lemon, one tablespoonful of orange-flower water, and three pints of water. In the course of four hours' time strain the juice off the strawberries into another basin, pressing them to extract as much juice as possible. Mix with the juice one pound of double-refined sugar, and stir it until the sugar has dissolved; then strain it and pack it in ice for an hour. Sherbet, Waldorf Style Put two pounds of sugar and one quart of water into a saucepan and boil it to a syrup. Put four ounces of stoned raisins into a basin with five ounces of chopped figs, half a dozen cloves, and a small piece of cinnamon. Pour the syrup over the above ingredients, and leave it till cool. Strain and color the syrup a delicate pink with a little prepared cochineal, add the juice of six oranges, two lemons and a small quantity of cinnamon, three or four cloves and one quart of port wine. Turn the mixture into the freezer and freeze it. When frozen take the cloves and cinnamon out of the mixture, add the scalded raisins and figs, one-half pound of muscatel grapes, and one-fourth pound of blanched almonds. When well incorporated the sherbet is ready for use.
Two recipes run together here: a still-chilled strawberry sherbet in the older, drinkable sense, and a far richer frozen port sherbet studded with dried fruit. Read them as separate dishes.
- What "sherbet" means hereThe first recipe is not churned and never freezes hard — it is a sweetened fruit drink packed in ice, closer to Persian sharbat than to scoop-shop sorbet. Serve it cold in glasses rather than expecting a scoopable ice.
- Packed in iceThe original means the basin buried in a pail of ice (salt would be added if a lower temperature were wanted, though the recipe does not say so). An hour in the refrigerator, or twenty minutes in an ice bath, gets you to the same place; the point is chilling, not setting.
- MeasuresThree pints is six cups; one quart is four. A pound of double-refined sugar is about 2¼ cups — double-refined simply means a clean white sugar with no molasses left in it, so ordinary granulated is the direct substitute.
- Orange-flower waterOne tablespoon is assertive by modern taste, and bottlings vary widely in strength. Start with a teaspoon in the strawberry sherbet and taste; too much reads as soap.
- CochinealSold today as carmine or cochineal extract, and still a legal food colour, though it is an animal product and a known allergen for a small number of people. Beet juice or a little extra strawberry does the same work.
- The port will fight the freezerA quart of fortified wine plus two pounds of sugar depresses the freezing point badly; in a domestic machine this sets to a slush at best. Churn it very cold, then hold it in the freezer, and accept a soft, spoonable texture.
- Muscatel grapes and almondsMuscatel grapes of this period would have had seeds, so halve and pit them before folding in unless yours are a seedless modern muscat. Blanched almonds means sweet almonds with the skins slipped off after a minute in boiling water; slivered blanched almonds work as sold.
- Scalded fruitThe raisins and figs are the ones strained out of the syrup, briefly refreshed in hot water so they are plump and soft rather than icy shards in the finished sherbet. Fold them in at the end, off the churn.
- YieldThe strawberry sherbet makes roughly two quarts of liquid, enough for eight glasses. The Waldorf version, with syrup, juice, wine and fruit, comes to something over three quarts and will serve a dozen in small cups — it is rich and meant as a course, not a dessert portion.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and its ices section preserves the older sense of the word sherbet: from Arabic sharba, by way of Persian and Turkish, meaning a drink rather than a frozen confection. The first recipe here is essentially that older thing — fruit macerated in water, sweetened, strained and chilled — and its orange-flower water recalls the Levantine and Ottoman drinks that European cooks copied in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The second, loaded with port, raisins, figs, cloves and almonds, is the hotel-dining-room descendant, closer to a spiced wine ice of the kind served between courses at long banquets to reset the palate. That both sit under one heading shows the word still doing double duty in an American kitchen at the end of the century, before "sherbet" settled into its modern American meaning of a light frozen dessert with a little dairy in it.