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Pineapple Sherbet (Boil one quart of water)
Boil one quart of water and one and one-half pounds of sugar for five minutes. Remove from the fire and add four cupfuls of grated pineapple and the juice of two lemons; strain this through cheese-cloth bag, squeezing at the last to extract all the juice. Turn this into freezer, and when partially frozen beat in the whites of two eggs that have been whipped to a stiff froth. Finish freezing and allow the sherbet to stand packed in the ice and salt at least one hour before serving.
A straightforward water ice from the era of the hand-crank freezer, with one element that no longer passes: the raw egg whites are beaten into the part-frozen sherbet and never reach any temperature at all.
- Why the cautionThe syrup is boiled, but it is cooled and combined with fruit long before the whites go in, and the mixture then only gets colder. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it. A shell-egg white whipped and stirred into a finished frozen dessert is an uncooked egg product served as-is, which is why modern recipes for sherbet either omit the white or specify a pasteurized one. Use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- "Freezer"At this date this means a bucket-style churn: an inner metal can turned by a crank, packed around with cracked ice and coarse salt. "Partially frozen" is the slushy stage a few minutes before the dasher stiffens.
- Sugar by weightOne and a half pounds is roughly 3⅓ cups of granulated sugar to the quart of water — a heavy syrup by modern standards, and deliberately so, since sugar is what keeps a churned ice from setting into a solid block.
- Four cupfuls of grated pineappleProbably in the region of two medium ripe pineapples. "Grated" means shredded on a grater, flesh and juice together, which is what the cheese-cloth bag is then for.
- BromelainFresh pineapple carries an enzyme that digests protein. It is one reason egg-white foam behaves badly in raw pineapple preparations, and a reason gelatin will not set with the fresh fruit. Brief contact with hot syrup does not reliably destroy it.
- Packing to ripenThe hour standing in ice and salt is not idle time. It firms and mellows the texture after churning — the step a modern machine recipe calls hardening, done in the freezer.
- YieldRoughly two quarts, or eight to ten small servings. Sherbets of this period were sometimes served in stemmed glasses as an intermediate course at formal dinners, though they were also served as dessert.
Sherbet in an American village cookbook sits between two older things: the Middle Eastern sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and the European water ice that borrowed its name. What separates it from a plain ice is generally the addition here — beaten white, sometimes a little gelatin or milk — giving a lighter, slightly foamy body. Canned Hawaiian pineapple was beginning to reach American markets in the early years of the twentieth century, but a receipt calling for four cupfuls grated and pressed through a bag assumes whole fresh fruit, still enough of an occasion to be worth the labor. Recipes like this appear in church and village collections because ice cream and ices were a standard offering at summer socials and lawn parties, where a crank freezer and a barrel of ice could turn out several quarts at a time.