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Orange Sherbet
Proceed as for Orange Ice until the mixture is half-frozen then add the whipped whites of two eggs to each quart of liquid and finish the process.
A one-line variation on the preceding Orange Ice, and the whole difference lies in two raw egg whites folded into a mixture that is never heated at any stage.
- Why the eggs are the problemThe whites go in when the ice is half-frozen and the batch is then finished and served cold. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it — it merely holds it. Whipping raw whites also aerates and distributes any contamination through the entire quart.
- No safe window in this methodUnlike a custard-based ice cream, where the eggs are cooked into the base before churning, here the whites are folded in at the half-frozen stage and are never heated at any point. The preceding Orange Ice base is not given here, but whatever it involves, the whites go in raw and stay raw. If you want an egg-white sherbet, use a current recipe written for pasteurized whites.
- What "sherbet" means hereIn American books of this era a sherbet is a water ice lightened with beaten egg white or, sometimes, gelatine or milk. It is not the modern commercial sherbet, which is defined by a small percentage of dairy fat. The egg white is doing textural work only — it keeps the ice from setting into a solid brick.
- Units and vesselsA quart of liquid is 4 cups, so the ratio is two whites per 4 cups. "Half-frozen" describes a hand-cranked freezer: the mixture has thickened to a slush but is not yet scoopable.
Water ices flavoured with citrus were among the cheapest branch of the American frozen-dessert repertoire, and orange was a common winter version. The distinction this book draws between an ice and a sherbet is the beaten egg white. Books of this period had no notion of egg-borne infection; Salmonella enteritidis in shell eggs was not identified as a widespread problem until the late twentieth century, which is why uncooked-white desserts appear so freely in nineteenth-century collections and so rarely in modern ones.