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Mint Sherbet
Put ten sprigs of fresh mint to soak for an hour in one cup of half each brandy and sherry. Strain and add three cups of water and two cups of sugar which have been boiled to a syrup, two teaspoons of granulated gelatine dissolved and the whites of four eggs beaten stiff. Freeze stiff.
A late-Victorian ice for the middle of a long dinner, written for a hand-cranked freezer and for eggs from the yard. The proportions are readable enough, but the method leaves one ingredient permanently raw.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe four beaten whites are folded into the mixture and then frozen; nothing in the method brings them anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg white is destroyed, and even a hot thin syrup diluted through five cups of liquid will not pasteurize them. Freezing does not kill it; it preserves it, and the sherbet is eaten cold and unchanged. If you want a mint sherbet of this style, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The alcohol does not sterilize itOne cup of brandy and sherry spread through roughly six cups of finished mixture works out to a few percent by volume, well below any level that would make the whites safe. The spirit is there for flavour and for texture, not for protection.
- A gill and a cupFor reading the surrounding pages: a gill is half a cup, a wineglass is roughly a quarter cup, and "one cup of half each" here means half a cup of each spirit.
- Granulated gelatine has changedTwo teaspoons of the granulated gelatine sold around 1900 should not be treated as equivalent to two teaspoons from a modern envelope; period gelatine was less standardized and its setting power is not documented in terms comparable to modern measures. Any straight substitution in a period gelatine recipe is guesswork.
- Freeze stiff"freeze stiff" assumes a bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt and turned by hand, which aerates the mixture as it hardens. The alcohol lowers the freezing point somewhat, so the mixture will set softer than a plain water ice.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of mixture before churning, allowing for the reduction of the syrup and the volume of the beaten whites.
Mint sherbet belongs to the Victorian and Edwardian habit of serving a small iced sweet partway through a long dinner, as a supposed aid to appetite. The word sherbet is generally traced back through Turkish and Persian to the Arabic sharbah, a drink, and in nineteenth-century American cookbooks it generally meant a water ice lightened with beaten egg white or gelatine rather than the dairy sherbet of later freezer cabinets. The brandy and sherry are doing double work here: they carry the mint's flavour out of the leaves during the hour-long steep, and they keep the finished ice soft enough to spoon.