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Pineapple Sherbet (Two quarts of water three cups)
Two quarts of water, three cups of sugar, juice of six lemons, one pint can grated pineapple, whites of three eggs. Boil water, sugar and lemon juice about twenty minutes; when cold add the pineapple; freeze. When it begins to stiffen in the freezer add the beaten whites, and finish freezing.
— Mrs. H. P. Pettengill
The failure point here is the finish: three raw egg whites are beaten and stirred into a cold, half-frozen mixture that is never heated again. Everything else about the receipt is sound period practice, but that step puts it outside what can be recommended today.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe syrup is boiled, but the instruction is explicit that it must be cold before the pineapple goes in, and the whites are added later still, once the sherbet has begun to stiffen. Nothing in the process heats the egg at all, let alone brings it to a temperature that would make it safe.
- Freezing is not a kill stepSalmonella survives freezing; a churned, frozen dessert simply preserves whatever was in the shell. Eggs for a contributed receipt of this kind would have come from a different supply chain than a supermarket carton, but that is no assurance of safety. If you want pineapple sherbet, use a current recipe.
- Why the whites are there at allThey are a stabiliser, not a flavour. Beaten albumen carries air into the mix and interferes with ice crystal growth, which is what kept a hand-cranked water ice from setting into a solid block. Modern formulas get the same effect from other means.
- "One pint can grated pineapple"A period pint can is 16 fl oz including its syrup, so roughly two cups of fruit and packing liquid, all of it going into the sherbet. Crushed pineapple is the nearest thing on a shelf now; canned pineapple of the era was packed in syrup and softer in texture than fresh.
- Boiling the lemon juiceTwenty minutes at a boil with the sugar drives off most of the fresh lemon aroma and leaves the acid and a faint cooked note. Six lemons yields something like a cup of juice, which is a lot of acid for two quarts of water and only three cups of sugar.
- "Freeze" means a crank freezerThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, cranked by hand, with the lid lifted partway through to add the whites. Nothing in that setup warms the mixture, which is another reason the egg stays raw.
- YieldRoughly two and a half quarts before churning, or about twelve to sixteen small servings.
"Sherbet" in an American cookbook of this period means a water ice, sharpened with citrus and lightened with beaten egg white or sometimes gelatine, as distinct from an ice cream built on cream or custard. The word came into English from Turkish serbet, itself from Persian sharbat and ultimately Arabic, and in nineteenth-century usage it still carried a hint of its origin as a cold sweetened drink rather than a spooned dessert. Canned grated pineapple points to a date after commercial pineapple canning expanded in the 1890s and 1900s, when a housewife inland could buy a pint can readily, where a generation earlier fresh pineapple was a luxury import handled whole. The recipe's shape - boil, cool, freeze, and fold in whites near the end - is a standard bucket-freezer procedure of the era, and the attribution to Mrs. H. P. Pettengill marks it as a contributed family receipt.