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Pineapple Sherbet
See Introductory Recipes or use the following: To one quart of boiling water add one and one-fourth pounds of sugar and juice of two lemons. Cook this for five minutes. Take from the fire and add two large pineapples grated, or one quart can of grated pineapple. Strain through a cloth, pressing hard to get out all the juice. Then freeze partially, when add beaten whites of two eggs and complete the freezing.
The syrup base here is boiled, but the egg whites go in at the very end and are then only frozen — they never reach a temperature that would make them safe. That is the one detail that rules this version out; the notes below explain the rest of the language so the page reads clearly.
- The raw egg whites are the problemTwo beaten whites are folded into a partly frozen sherbet and never heated. Freezing does not reliably destroy Salmonella; surviving bacteria remain a risk once the mixture is eaten. Nothing in the method heats the whites at all, so this should not be made as printed with untreated eggs. Use pasteurised whites or a current sherbet recipe instead.
- Why the whites are there at allThey are not for flavour. Beaten whites were a common nineteenth-century way to lighten a water ice, adding air and discouraging large ice crystals — the job now done by pasteurised meringue powder, commercial stabilisers, or simply a higher sugar content and hard churning.
- The sugar is not optional weightOne and a quarter pounds to a quart of water is roughly three cups of sugar to four cups of liquid, a heavy syrup. In a fruit ice sugar controls the freezing point as much as the sweetness; cutting it produces a solid block rather than a scoopable sherbet.
- "Freeze partially"This assumes a churn freezer: the mixture is worked until it is a thick slush that still takes a spoon, additions are stirred in, and churning resumes. No clock time is given, as timing varied with the freezer and its ice and salt.
- A quart can of grated pineappleCanned grated pineapple of the period was packed in juice or syrup and is not an exact match for modern crushed pineapple, so quantities and sweetness may need adjusting.
- Straining through a clothThe hard pressing is doing real work: pineapple fibre survives freezing as unpleasant strings. The recipe wants juice only.
- YieldPerhaps two quarts finished, depending on how much juice the pineapples give up.
Pineapple was the showpiece fruit of the American table for most of the nineteenth century — expensive and associated with hospitality; small Hawaiian canning ventures began in the 1890s, though the industry only became significant after 1901. Sherbet in this sense means a water ice, sweetened fruit juice frozen with agitation, distinct from ice cream by the absence of dairy; the word is generally traced through Turkish şerbet to Arabic sharbah, a drink, and early versions were exactly that, a chilled sweet drink rather than a frozen one. That this recipe offers grated fresh fruit and a quart can as equal alternatives places it firmly in the moment when canned pineapple had become reliable enough for a cookbook to treat it as ordinary.