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Grape Sherbet
Grape sherbet is one of the most delicious of ices. It is made by mixing together three cupfuls of grape juice, two cupfuls of cold water, the juice of four lemons and four cupfuls of sugar. Freeze and allow it to remain packed for four hours at least, as the flavor is improved by the freezing process.
A four-ingredient water ice that depends entirely on ratio. The one number worth questioning is the sugar.
- The sugar is the hingeFour cups of sugar against roughly five and a half cups of liquid is close to 40 percent sugar by weight, well above the 20–25 percent that lets a sherbet set firm. In a modern machine it will churn to slush and stay there. Between 1.5 and 2 cups gives a scoopable ice with the same flavour.
- Why the original called for itIce-and-salt bucket freezers get well below the freezing point of water, so a very sweet mix would still stiffen; the sugar may also have helped keep the texture from going coarse.
- Grape juiceRead this as unsweetened bottled Concord juice, not a sweetened grape drink or cocktail. If you use a sweetened juice, cut the added sugar further and taste the mix before freezing.
- The lemonsFour lemons of the period yield roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice. Start with 1/2 cup; the acid balances the heavy sugar as well as flavouring the ice, so do not omit it.
- "Freeze"The instruction assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned until the paddle stiffens. An ice cream machine handles it in 20 to 30 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes.
- "Packed for four hours"This is ripening, not flavour development in any mysterious sense: the ice hardens and the texture smooths as it rests. Four hours in the coldest part of the freezer, covered, does the same job.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts, serving eight to ten in small glasses.
Sherbet reaches English by way of the Turkish and Persian şerbet/sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and only later came to mean a frozen one; nineteenth-century American cookbooks use the word for a water ice, sometimes lightened with beaten egg white or gelatine, as distinct from the cream-based ice. Grape sherbet belongs to a particular moment: bottled unfermented grape juice, pressed and pasteurised so it would not turn to wine, became a widely sold household staple by the 1890s and was embraced by temperance households as a respectable substitute for anything grape-flavoured and alcoholic. That is why a book like this can call for three cupfuls of grape juice as casually as it calls for water.