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Lemon Ice
One quart of water, juice of four lemons, one pound of sugar; strain the syrup, and when ready to freeze beat the whites of three eggs to a stiff froth and add.
A plain water ice of the sort made in a hand-cranked freezer, with beaten egg whites folded in at the end to lighten it. The whites are the problem: they go in raw and nothing in the method ever heats them.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe three whites are beaten and added at the freezing stage, so the finished ice is an uncooked egg product. Salmonella is carried on and occasionally within the shell egg, and whites are as capable of carrying it as yolks.
- Freezing does not make it safeChilling and freezing suspend bacterial growth; they do not reliably kill Salmonella. A contaminated mixture that is frozen for a week and then eaten is still a contaminated mixture.
- The lemon juice is not a safeguardThe acidity of four lemons in a quart of water and a pound of sugar is nowhere near enough, nor held long enough at any temperature, to pasteurise the whites. Acid in a cold sweet syrup is not a substitute for heat.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are specifically advised against for young children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- If you want a lemon iceUse a current recipe. Modern versions either omit the whites, use a cooked meringue, or specify pasteurised whites, and they will tell you the quantities and temperatures that make that work.
Water ices reached American household books largely through the French and Italian confectioners prominent in ice-making in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and lemon was among the common flavours — cheap, keenly acidic, and forgiving of the coarse texture a hand-cranked pail freezer produced. The beaten whites here are doing the job that stabilisers and churning speed do now: air folded in at the last moment helped keep the ice from setting into a solid block of sweetened lemon water. A quart of water to a pound of sugar was a common working ratio in books of this period, high enough to keep the mixture from freezing rock hard in a salted-ice bath. That such a book expects the reader to have a freezer, ice and rock salt to hand says a good deal about the commercial ice trade of the period, which brought frozen desserts within reach of many ordinary households.