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Pineapple Sherbet
Grate two pineapples. Boil together one quart of granulated sugar and two quarts of water; when thick, pour it over the grated pineapple. Add the whites of four eggs beaten very stiff and the juice of two lemons. Put in a freezer and freeze.
The sugar work and the fruit here are sound, but the four raw egg whites are folded in after the syrup has cooled on the fruit and are never heated again — that is the reason this one stays on the page as a document rather than a plan for the afternoon.
- The raw whites are the problemThe recipe gives no cooking step after the beaten whites go in, and no instruction that guarantees the mixture is hot enough to pasteurise them when they are added. Nothing in the method reliably brings the egg to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and freezing preserves bacteria rather than killing them. A current sherbet recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- Why the whites were there at allStiff whites were a common way to keep a water ice from freezing into a solid block — the foam holds air through the churning. This is not primarily a flavour ingredient, which is why the recipe treats it so casually.
- A quart of sugarGranulated sugar was measured by volume in these books. A quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz or 800 g, against 2 quarts (8 cups) of water — a light syrup by modern sorbet standards.
- "When thick"A reduction cue rather than a time: boil until the syrup has visibly thickened. The recipe does not say how far, and the volume will drop before it happens.
- Two pineapplesTwo pineapples grated, juice and all, is on the order of 4 to 5 cups of pulp — roughly one large modern fruit plus part of a second.
- "Put in a freezer"The freezer is a hand-crank churn: an inner canister set in a bucket packed with cracked ice and coarse rock salt, cranked until the paddle stiffens. It is a machine, not a compartment, and the instruction assumes the reader owns one.
- YieldSyrup and fruit together make a large batch by present-day household standards, though how large depends on how far the syrup is reduced.
Sherbets in American cookbooks of this period sit in a narrow band between the water ice and the ice cream: no dairy, but lightened with beaten egg white or sometimes gelatine so the texture stays scrapeable rather than glassy. Pineapple's appearance in a book aimed at ordinary households is itself telling: the fruit had become something a cook could buy and grate two of without comment. The grating itself is worth noting: without a blender, pulping fruit by hand on a coarse grater was the only route to the fine, fibrous texture a sherbet needs.