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London Sherbet
2 cups sugar 2 cups water 1/3 cup seeded and finely cut raisins 3/4 cup orange juice 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup fruit syrup 1/4 grated nutmeg 1/4 cup port wine Whites 3 eggs Make syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes; pour over raisins, cool, and add fruit syrup and nutmeg; freeze to a mush, then add wine and whites of eggs beaten stiff, and continue freezing. Serve in glasses. Fruit syrup may be used which has been left from canned peaches, pears, or strawberries. Roman Punch 4 cups water 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup lemon juice 1/2 cup orange juice 1/2 cup tea infusion 1/2 cup rum Prepare and freeze same as Cardinal Punch.
Coup Sicilienne 1 shredded pineapple 3 oranges (pulp) 3 bananas sliced 2 tablespoons Maraschino 1 tablespoon lemon juice Few grains salt Powdered sugar Mix ingredients, sweeten to taste, and chill. Serve in champagne glasses having glasses two-thirds full. Cover fruit to fill glasses with Strawberry Ice II and garnish with strawberries and angelica.
Vanilla Ice Cream I (Philadelphia) 1 quart thin cream 3/4 cup sugar 1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla Mix ingredients, and freeze.
A frozen punch from the era when a sweetened ice was served between courses rather than at the end. The raw egg white folded in at the end is the reason this one cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Uncooked egg whiteThe whites go into a mixture that has been frozen, never heated, and the sherbet is served straight from the freezer. Nothing in the process brings the egg above a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sugar and alcohol present are nowhere near enough to do it either. Use a current recipe if you want a meringue-lightened ice.
- Why the whites are there at allBeaten white was one common nineteenth-century way to give a water ice body and a pale, foamy texture in a hand-cranked freezer, which incorporates less air than a modern machine. The wine also depresses the freezing point, so the mixture stays softer.
- "1/4 grated nutmeg"This means a quarter of a whole nutmeg, grated, not a quarter teaspoon of the ground spice. Whole nutmegs vary, but a quarter of an average one is roughly half a teaspoon grated.
- Fruit syrupThe canning liquid left from peaches, pears or strawberries, which many households would have had on hand. Commercial canned fruit in light syrup gives the nearest equivalent; its sweetness varies, so the sugar in the base is not fixed.
- The citrusOrange and lemon juice are listed but never mentioned again in the method. Presumably they are meant to go in with the fruit syrup, after the sugar syrup has cooled.
- "Freeze to a mush"The stage at which the mixture is slushy and thickened but not set hard, which in a salt-and-ice freezer meant cranking until the paddle grew stiff. Additions are made at this point because anything folded into a fully frozen ice will not distribute.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half before the whites are added. The recipe gives no number of servings; in the small stemmed glasses of the period that would be ten to twelve.