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Grape Fruit Sherbet
Cut five shaddock or grape fruit in halves; carefully remove the seeds and then the pulp. Reject all the white skin. Press the pulp through a sieve. Boil one pound of sugar with one cupful of water for seven minutes. Have a tablespoonful of granulated gelatine softened in cold water. Stir this into the boiling syrup and cool. When cold, turn into a freezer and proceed same as with ice cream, but do not freeze it nearly so hard.
A short recipe with one significant gap: it never tells you to combine the fruit pulp with the syrup. Do that once the syrup is cold, then churn.
- The missing stepPress the pulp and juice through the sieve into a bowl, boil and cool the gelatine syrup separately, then stir the two together before freezing. Adding the juice to hot syrup dulls the fresh citrus flavour, which is presumably why the syrup is cooled first.
- Shaddock is not grapefruitThe recipe treats them as interchangeable, but a shaddock is a pomelo — larger, drier, milder, with very thick pith. Five grapefruit yield roughly 4 to 5 cups of juice and pulp; five pomelos give less juice and a much gentler flavour, so taste and adjust.
- Reject the white skin, seriouslyThis is the line that decides whether the sherbet is refreshing or medicinal. Any pith or membrane carried through with the pulp will make the mixture bitter.
- A pound of sugarAbout 2¼ cups granulated. With one cup of water boiled seven minutes you get a heavy syrup; if it starts to colour at the edges pull it off the heat, as caramel is not wanted here.
- Granulated gelatineA tablespoon is roughly 1⅓ envelopes of modern powdered gelatine (an envelope is 2¼ teaspoons). It is there to keep the ice crystals fine in a period churn, not to set the mixture.
- "Turn into a freezer"This means a hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt, not the appliance in your kitchen. A modern ice cream maker works directly; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat thoroughly with a fork or in a food processor two or three times as it sets.
- Do not freeze it hardSherbet of this era was served at the slushy, spoonable stage, softer than ice cream. Churn to the texture of thick snow and serve at once; a night in a modern freezer will give you a solid brick.
- YieldRoughly 1½ quarts, or ten or twelve small glasses.
Grapefruit was still relatively unfamiliar in northern American kitchens in this period: it had been grown in Florida and the West Indies for decades before becoming a commercial crop shipped north, largely from the 1880s onward. That may explain the wording — "shaddock or grape fruit" — since the two citrus were not always firmly distinguished in American kitchens, the shaddock (pomelo) being the older name. Its English name is traditionally traced to a sea captain said to have carried seed to Barbados, though that is tradition rather than documented fact. Lightly frozen ices of this kind were sometimes served between courses at a formal dinner as well as at the end of one, which may be why the recipe insists it be left soft.