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Frozen Bananas
Add to one dozen crushed bananas the juice of two oranges and a pint of sugar. Freeze partially, then add the whipped whites of two eggs and finish freezing.
The failure here is the finishing step: raw, unheated egg white folded into a mixture that is then frozen and eaten cold.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present in and on shell eggs. The risk was not understood when this was written; whipped whites were a common way to lighten a water ice.
- Freezing does not make it safeChilling and freezing suspend bacterial growth rather than destroying the organisms, and the mixture sits for a long stretch at ice-cream churning temperatures before it hardens. A frozen dessert is not a sterilised one.
- The acid is not a safeguardOrange juice and banana are mildly acidic but nowhere near acidic enough, for long enough, to be treated as a kill step. If you want a banana ice with meringue body, use a current recipe written for pasteurised egg product.
- "Freeze partially" assumes a crank freezerThe instruction belongs to a hand-cranked ice-and-salt bucket, where the cook could stop, open the can, and fold in additions part way through. It is a description of a machine, not a timing.
- A pint of sugarSugar was commonly measured by volume in this period: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. Against a dozen bananas that is a very sweet mixture by modern taste, and it was partly there to keep the ice soft rather than solid.
- A dozen bananasBananas of the day were largely the Gros Michel type; twelve of them would yield in the region of 4 to 5 cups of pulp, enough for a large freezer can serving eight or more.
Bananas were a novelty in North American markets in the 1870s and an everyday grocery by the 1900s, the change driven by steam shipping and the growth of the fruit trade out of the Caribbean and Central America. The method itself is older than the fruit's ubiquity: a sweetened fruit purée frozen in a salt-and-ice bucket, lightened partway through with whipped egg white, is a standard nineteenth-century water ice, and cookbooks of the era applied it to a wide range of fruits. Attaching it to the banana is the point of the entry, a demonstration that the imported fruit could stand in for the familiar ones.