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Pink Sherbet
Take one pint of currant jelly and dissolve in one quart and a half of boiling water; two cups of sugar, juice of three lemons, dissolve well and strain through a fine cloth, and freeze.
If you have not the currant, either plum or grape jelly is very nice. When almost well enough frozen the whites of four eggs, well beaten, must be added.
For parties or receptions, where a larger quantity is needed, it is very nice to make one freezer full of white and another of pink sherbet, and serve both white and pink on each dish. This arrangement is very pretty and gives variety. -Mrs. Fudge Dills, Sherman, Texas.
A jelly-based water ice from the era of hand-cranked freezers. The mixture itself is straightforward sugar syrup and fruit jelly, but the final step puts raw egg white into a cold food that is never heated, and that is why the recipe cannot be recommended as printed.
- Why the cautionThe four beaten whites go in at the end, when the sherbet is already nearly frozen, and nothing in the method ever brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria rather than destroying them, and the dish is explicitly intended for parties and receptions, where it may reach children, elderly guests and pregnant women. For a fruit sherbet with beaten whites, use a current recipe.
- A pint of jellyMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, or roughly the contents of two standard 8-oz jars. Homemade currant jelly of the period was probably firmer and more tart than much of the commercial jelly sold now.
- Quart and a half of waterSix cups. With the jelly, sugar and lemon juice the total comes to a little over two quarts of liquid — a full charge for a large ice cream freezer, and more than most modern 1.5-quart domestic machines will hold in one batch.
- Two cups of sugarJudged against sharp homemade currant jelly. Grape or plum jelly, and modern jelly generally, is sweeter, so the syrup should be tasted before freezing; a sherbet base wants to taste slightly too sweet and too tart at room temperature, since cold mutes both.
- StrainingThe fine cloth is there to catch undissolved jelly and pulp, which would otherwise freeze into gritty specks. Dissolve the jelly fully in the boiling water first, then strain, then chill the base thoroughly before it goes into the freezer.
- "Almost well enough frozen"In a crank freezer this is the slushy stage, still soft enough to stir but holding its shape on a spoon — the point at which the churn begins to labour.
- YieldSomewhat over two quarts, or twelve to sixteen small party servings of the kind the recipe has in mind.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period generally means a water ice, without cream, often built on fruit juice or — as here — on jelly. Red currants were a common kitchen-garden fruit in the nineteenth century and set easily into jelly because of their high pectin and acid; jelly kept well and gave both colour and body. Beaten egg white folded in at the end appears in a number of printed sherbet recipes of the late 1800s, where it was meant to lighten the texture and keep the ice from freezing into a solid block. Serving pink and white together on one dish suits the reception-table fashion of the turn of the century, when contributed-recipe books like this one collected such touches from readers by name; little is now known of Mrs. Dills of Sherman, Texas, beyond her signature here.