Sherbet
One pine apple, four lemons, two quarts water, two tea-cups sugar; steep the pine-apple in the water for two hours; strain and add the juice of the lemons and sugar; whip the whites of five eggs, add to them three table-spoons of sugar; place all in freezer, freeze at once. Adding the sugar to the whites gives body to the sherbet; it is excellent. - Mrs. M. B. Sperry, Nashville, Tenn.
A contributed recipe from the 1877 Ohio compilation, built around a hand-crank ice-cream freezer. The problem with it is not the technique but the five raw egg whites, which are never heated at any stage.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteThe whipped whites go straight into the freezer with cold fruit liquid, so nothing in the mixture ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria rather than destroying them, and the finished sherbet is eaten as-is. Use a current sherbet or sorbet recipe instead.
- Quantity matters hereFive whites spread through two quarts of base is a large amount of unheated egg across many servings, and the meringue is beaten in for texture rather than cooked, so there is no step where the risk could be removed.
- "Freezer" is not an applianceIn 1877 this means a pail-and-dasher ice-cream freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand. "Freeze at once" most likely means not letting the base stand while the whipped whites deflate or the ice melts.
- Two tea-cups of sugarA period tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, roughly two-thirds of one, so the sugar is somewhere near 1 1/3 cups plus the three tablespoons beaten into the whites. Nineteenth-century cup measures were not standardised, and this is an estimate rather than a conversion.
- Cold-steeped pineappleTwo hours in cold water will draw out less pineapple flavour than crushing or juicing the fruit, so the four lemons carry much of the flavour. Raw pineapple also contains bromelain, an enzyme that breaks down protein and can work against an egg or dairy set.
- YieldTwo quarts of base plus the beaten whites would fill a small domestic freezer can; the recipe itself gives no number of servings.
"Sherbet" descends through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and in nineteenth-century American cookbooks the word still sits closer to a beverage than to a dessert ice. Beaten egg white was a common addition to water ices of the period: with no stabilisers and only a hand-turned dasher for aeration, the meringue was one of the few things that could give the frozen mixture the "body" Mrs. Sperry mentions. The pineapple is worth noticing too. Buckeye Cookery was published in Minneapolis in 1877, and a whole fresh pineapple reaching a Nashville kitchen depended on the steamship and rail trade that had recently made Caribbean fruit a reasonable, if still notable, extravagance inland.