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Lemon Sherbet
To the syrup given above add juice of three lemons and one orange. The sugar used in the syrup should have been treated as for "Lemon Sugar for Flavouring" or flavoured with a little pure lemon oil. Place in freezer and when halffrozen add the whipped whites of two eggs, then finish freezing. The yolks of the eggs may be added with equally good flavour and make the sherbet more acceptable and nourishing for invalids.
This is a water ice enriched with raw egg, and the book expressly recommends the version with raw yolks for the sick. That is the part that has not aged.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe whites, and optionally the yolks, are folded into a half-frozen sherbet and never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not kill it; it simply holds it. The acidity of the lemon juice is not sufficient either.
- The invalid recommendation is the worst of itThe people the author names as the intended eaters -- the ill, the convalescent, the frail -- are precisely the group for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to become invasive rather than merely unpleasant. The same applies to small children, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- Slow churning holds it in the danger zone"When half-frozen" -- the canister is opened and the mixture worked mid-churn. If you want a sherbet with the body that beaten egg white gives, use a current recipe built on a cooked base or pasteurised egg.
- "The syrup given above"The recipe is not self-contained; it depends on a sugar syrup recipe printed earlier in the section, and on a separate entry for lemon sugar. Read as a standalone page it gives no quantity of syrup at all.
- Lemon oil"Pure lemon oil" here means oil expressed from the peel rather than an alcohol-based extract. Modern lemon extract is much weaker; the two are not interchangeable drop for drop.
- "Place in freezer"The freezer in this period is the churn -- a pail packed with ice and coarse salt around an inner canister with a dasher -- not a compartment of a refrigerator. The instruction to add egg "when half-frozen" assumes you can open the canister mid-churn.
Sherbet reaches English cookery from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, by way of Turkish and Persian usage; by the nineteenth century in Britain and America the word had settled on a fruit ice lighter than ice cream, generally made with water or milk rather than custard. Lemon was among the commonest flavours, and lemon was strongly associated with the sickroom: lemonade, lemon whey and lemon jelly appear in the invalid-cookery chapters of many books of the period. That is the logic behind the closing sentence here. Egg yolk was widely regarded as a concentrated, easily taken nourishment for people who could not face solid food. The reasoning was sound by the standards of the day; what was missing was any understanding of the bacteriology of the egg itself.