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Melange Glace
Take the juice and grated rind of four oranges, the juice and grated rind of four lemons, four bananas broken in pieces, being careful not to use a knife about the bananas, and mix with a liquid made of two quarts of water, very hot; four cups of sugar or more, as the taste may demand, one-half box of Cox' gelatine; all the ingredients of the liquid brought to a boil on the stove. Set on the ice until thoroughly chilled, and then freeze. When about half frozen add one quart of sweet cream, whipped to a stiff froth with the whites of six fresh eggs. Then freeze till very hard, pack in ice and leave for several hours to ripen. Some regard the addition of grated pineapple a great addition. Other fruits may be added or substituted. The juice of ripe raspberries that have stood in sugar for several hours is a great addition. Of course, when you use the raspberry juice you must decrease the amount of the water by the amount of juice used. the addition of the cream and eggs is entirely optional, some preferring the "mélange" without it. Be careful to use only earthen vessels in the preparation of this dainty. -Mrs. Fudge Halley, Newton, Illinois.
A community-cookbook frozen dessert from the era of the hand-crank freezer, written for a kitchen with an ice chest and a barrel of rock salt. The sherbet base itself is unremarkable, but the finishing step puts uncooked egg white into a mixture that is never heated again.
- Why this one failsThe six egg whites are whipped raw into a base that has already been chilled, then frozen and held for hours. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella; freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them. If you want a frozen mousse of this kind, use a current recipe built on a cooked meringue or a pasteurised product.
- Half a box of Cox' gelatineCox's was a Scottish gelatine (J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh) sold by the box. Period box sizes varied, so the modern equivalent cannot be fixed exactly; a half box is often reckoned at something like two of today's envelopes, but the strength of period gelatine is not directly comparable and the quantity should be treated as genuinely approximate.
- "Freeze" means a churnEvery instruction here assumes a bucket freezer: the canister turns inside a packing of crushed ice and coarse salt, and "half frozen" is the slushy stage at which additions are folded in. "Pack in ice and leave to ripen" is the hardening period, which a modern freezer accomplishes on its own.
- Earthen vesselsThe warning is chemical, not fussiness. Four oranges' and four lemons' worth of juice attacks bare tin, iron and unlined copper, producing a metallic taste and grey discolouration. Glass, glazed earthenware or stainless steel all satisfy the same requirement.
- No knife near the bananasThe recipe gives no reason, but it sits alongside the earthenware instruction and most likely reflects the same avoidance of metal contact: steel blades of the period were held to discolour cut fruit, so the bananas are broken by hand.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the cultured or "loppered" cream common in the same books. Heavy or whipping cream is the equivalent.
- YieldTwo quarts of water, four cups of sugar and a quart of cream make something close to a gallon before churning: a quantity for a party rather than a family supper.
Mélange glacé is simply French for "frozen mixture," and the borrowed name did the work that "fruit sherbet" would not: it signalled a company dish. Water ices and gelatine-thickened fruit ices of this type spread through American households in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as commercial ice harvesting made packed ice cheaper in inland towns and the crank freezer became a common domestic appliance. The structure of the recipe — a boiled sugar-and-gelatine syrup, citrus juice and rind for flavour, then optional cream and beaten whites to turn a sherbet into something nearer a frozen mousse — is typical of the period's flexible, contributed formulas, as is the string of afterthoughts about raspberries and grated pineapple. Contributions signed with a name and town, like this one from Newton, Illinois, point to a compiled cookbook assembled from contributors' own cards rather than written by a single professional hand.