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Apricot Ice (Over one box of gelatine put)
Over one box of gelatine put enough cold water to cover, let stand half an hour, then add one quart of boiling water, the juice of six or eight lemons, and sugar enough to please the taste. Stir well, strain through a clean cloth and set aside to cool. To the above add one can of apricotsfresh fruit is better in season-that have been peeled and run through a sieve. Mix well together and freeze. When the ice begins to harden add the beaten whites of four eggs. If canned fruit is used, the juice, of course, is used.
Mrs. F. P. Hird.
CHAPTER XIX.
A lemon-and-apricot water ice stiffened with gelatine, from the era when a hand-cranked freezer sat on the back porch. The finishing step puts raw egg white into a mixture that is never heated, which is where it fails for a modern kitchen.
- The raw whites are the problemFour beaten egg whites go into the part-frozen ice and are never cooked, pasteurised, or brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not destroy the organism; it simply holds it. Neither the lemon juice nor the sugar is an effective control here.
- Not fixable by adjusting the methodThere is no timing or temperature change that makes uncooked whites in a frozen dessert safe. If you want an apricot ice with a meringue lightening, work from a current recipe built around pasteurised whites or a cooked syrup meringue.
- Stray line at the top"SOUP OR STEW POT AND LID" is a caption from an adjacent illustration or advertisement that has drifted into the text block. It has nothing to do with the ice, and neither does the "CHAPTER XIX" at the end.
- A box of gelatineAround 1900 a box of granulated gelatine held something in the region of half an ounce to an ounce, depending on the maker, and manufacturers' own claims for how much liquid a box would set varied. It is not equivalent to a modern quarter-ounce envelope, and the original gives no weight, so the quantity here is genuinely ambiguous.
- Six or eight lemonsEight lemons might yield somewhere around a cup to a cup and a half of juice. "Sugar enough to please the taste" was doing considerable work in a mixture that acidic.
Water ices thickened with gelatine were a practical solution to a real problem: a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt produces a coarse, grainy product unless something in the base interferes with crystal growth. Gelatine, sold cheaply in boxes from the 1890s onward, did that job, and beaten whites folded in at the half-frozen stage added air and turned an ice into something closer to what cooks of the period called a sherbet. The apricots reflect the same commercial shift: canned California fruit was widely available by the turn of the century, which is why Mrs. Hird can offer it as the default while still noting that fresh is better in season. Contributed recipes signed with a member's name, as this one is, generally suggest a community or church compilation, where the cookbook doubled as a roster of the women who assembled it.