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Lemon Sherbet
Mix with the juice of six lemons, one and three-fourths pounds of good white sugar. Pour over the rinds of lemons two quarts of water (while boiling). Stir the water into the sugar and juice; beat five eggs to a stiff froth (the whites). Put the whole into the freezer, and when slightly frozen add one pint of good cream, whites of eggs stirred well together. Then freeze.
This is a water ice enriched with raw egg white and cream, and the egg white is the problem: it is folded into a cold, barely frozen base and never reaches any temperature that would make it safe.
- The raw egg whitesFive whites are beaten and stirred into the part-frozen mixture, and nothing afterwards heats them. Salmonella lives on and in shell eggs and is not killed by freezing; a frozen dessert simply preserves whatever was there. The boiling water poured over the rinds is long cooled and diluted by the time the whites go in, so it contributes nothing.
- Why churning does not helpAir incorporated in a sherbet freezer does not sanitise anything. Nor does the acidity of six lemons: the whites are added late, into a large volume of sweetened, diluted liquid, and dilute acid at freezing temperature is not a kill step.
- If you want lemon sherbetUse a current recipe, one that either omits the egg white, uses pasteurised whites, or builds the aeration from a cooked Italian meringue.
- Reading the quantitiesFor interest only: one and three-quarter pounds of sugar is a shade under four cups, and two quarts of water plus a pint of cream, with the sugar and juice, gives something over three quarts of base, which suits the pail freezers of the period.
Sherbet in nineteenth-century American cookbooks sits between the plain water ice and the ice cream: a fruit ice given body with a little cream, beaten egg white, or dissolved gelatine, so that it froze smooth rather than granular. The word came into English from Turkish şerbet and Persian sharbat, ultimately from Arabic sharba, a drink; the parallel form sorbet reached English through Italian sorbetto and French. The earliest sherbets really were chilled sweetened fruit drinks rather than frozen ones. The technique here — pouring boiling water over the pared rinds to draw the oil out before combining it with the juice — is the standard period method for getting lemon flavour, since the aromatic oils sit in the zest and the acid in the juice. Recipes of this sort proliferated once the hand-cranked freezer with its ice-and-salt bucket became a common household item after the mid-1800s, moving iced desserts out of the confectioner's shop and into the domestic kitchen.