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Sorbet, Favourite
Prepare a lemon water ice. Press a pint of well picked and washed fresh or canned strawberries through a sieve into the freezer with the lemon ice, adding two tablespoons good rum; thoroughly mix and let freeze for fifteen minutes, then divide the punch into six sherbet glasses and serve.
A two-part recipe that assumes you already have a lemon water ice in the freezer canister — the instruction here is really about what to fold into it. The whole thing is finished in about fifteen minutes of churning.
- The missing base"Lemon water ice" is not defined on this page; the book assumes you will find it elsewhere. It is a sugar syrup, water and lemon juice, frozen without dairy or egg. Proportions in the region of 2 cups sugar dissolved in 1 quart water with the juice of 5 or 6 lemons will serve; make it, chill it hard, then start here.
- "The freezer" is a churnHere this means the metal canister of a hand-crank ice-cream freezer packed in ice and rock salt, not a compartment in an appliance. An electric ice-cream maker does the same job; if you have neither, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 20 minutes.
- Fifteen minutes means texture, not a timerThe purée and rum go into ice that is already partly frozen, and fifteen more minutes of churning is enough to bring it back to a slush. Sorbet with alcohol in it will not set firm — that softness is the point, and pushing it longer in a modern machine only builds ice crystals.
- Sieve the berries, do not blend themPressing a pint of strawberries through a sieve removes the seeds and gives a smooth purée; a blender leaves grit and whips in air. A pint of fresh berries yields roughly 3/4 cup of purée. Canned strawberries, the alternative given, come in syrup, so drain them and expect a sweeter result.
- The rumTwo tablespoons is deliberately restrained. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so too much will stop the mixture setting; the small quantity here keeps it churnable. A dark or gold rum stands up to the lemon better than a white one.
- "Punch" and the glassesThe recipe is titled a sorbet, but the text calls the mixture "punch" and the vessels "sherbet glasses"; the terms were used loosely for the same spirit-spiked ice. Sherbet glasses were small stemmed glasses, so this is six palate-cleansing servings rather than six full desserts.
- ServingChill the glasses first. Spooned soft into cold glass, the sorbet holds shape for a few minutes; served in a warm dish it collapses to a drink almost immediately.
The spirit-laced water ice served in a small stemmed glass belongs to the long formal dinner, where it arrived somewhere in the middle of the service order as a break in the meal — Roman punch, the rum-and-lemon version, was the standard for this and appears on menus through the second half of the nineteenth century. That is why the quantities here are so small and the rum so modest: it was a pause, not a course. The alternative of canned strawberries is the giveaway that this is a book of its moment, when commercial canning had made a summer fruit available in February and cookbook writers were happy to say so. The appearance of "sorbet" in the title reflects how loosely the terms were still used in English kitchens; the French word had arrived as a fashionable one without quite displacing the older one.