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Strawberry Sherbet
Two quarts of strawberries, one pint of sugar, one pint and a half of water, one teaspoonful of gelatine. Mash the berries and sugar together and let them stand two hours. Soak the gelatine in cold water. Add one pint of the water to the strawberries and strain. Dissolve the gelatine in half pint of boiling water; add this to the strained mixture and freeze.
A straightforward fruit sherbet from the era of the hand-crank freezer, with just enough gelatine to keep it from setting into a solid block. The whole thing turns on temperature: get the mixture properly cold before it goes into the machine.
- Measures by volumeTwo quarts of strawberries is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of berries, hulled. A pint of sugar is 2 cups (about 14 oz); a pint and a half of water is 3 cups, of which 2 cups go into the fruit and 1 cup is boiled for the gelatine.
- The gelatineOne teaspoonful of granulated gelatine is a little under half a modern 1/4-oz envelope (an envelope runs about 2 1/4 teaspoons). Soften it in a few tablespoons of cold water for five minutes, then dissolve in the hot water. It is there to soften the ice crystals rather than to set the mixture, so resist adding more.
- Chill before churningThe recipe sends a mixture containing a half pint of boiling water straight to the freezer. Cool it and then refrigerate until thoroughly cold, ideally several hours, or the churn will simply melt its own ice and you will get coarse crystals.
- The two-hour macerationNot optional. Sugar draws the juice and colour out of the berries and dissolves completely in it, which is what makes the strained liquid taste of strawberry rather than of sweetened water.
- StrainingPress the pulp hard through a fine sieve rather than letting it drain; the flavour is in the pulp, and a clear, thin liquid will freeze icy. Discard only the seeds and the exhausted fibre.
- FreezingAn ice-cream machine handles this directly. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes until it is a fine slush, roughly three hours.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts. Sherbet made with this little gelatine and no dairy hardens considerably after a day; let it stand 10 minutes before scooping, and serve within a few days while the fresh fruit flavour holds.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period meant a frozen fruit ice, sometimes with a little milk or beaten egg white but often, as here, with nothing but fruit, sugar, water and a trace of gelatine. The word came into English from Turkish serbet and Persian/Arabic sharbat, a sweetened drink -- the same root that gives Italian sorbetto and French sorbet -- and the drink sense survived alongside the frozen one well into the nineteenth century. Gelatine in a fruit ice suggests a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century date: packaged granulated gelatine had by then become cheap and widely available, and some household writers used it to keep hand-cranked ices smooth without the eggs or cream that would have made them ice cream instead.