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Peach Sherbet
One quart of peach juice, two cups of sugar, one quart of water, whites of two eggs, juice of one lemon. Boil water and sugar together, add juice of peaches and lemon, and freeze. -Mrs S. R. Van Sant.
The ingredient list calls for the whites of two eggs, and nothing in the recipe ever heats them. That is the problem with this one.
- Raw egg white, never cookedOnly the water and sugar are boiled; the whites are never brought into contact with anything hot, and the finished mixture is simply frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only holds it. Unpasteurized raw egg white in a dessert that is never brought above about 160F is the specific failure here, and a current recipe should be used instead.
- The whites are not even placedThe method never says when or how to add them. Many recipes of the period direct that whites be beaten stiff and folded in when the sherbet is half frozen, but the text as printed leaves the step out entirely, so there is no way to follow the recipe as written.
- "Freeze" means a crank freezerAt the time this meant a hand-cranked churn packed with cracked ice and rock salt, which is why the mixture could be thin and still come out smooth. A modern still-freezer in a tub will give a much coarser result from the same liquid.
- A quart of peach juiceThis is pressed and strained juice from ripe peaches, not nectar or pur he be several pounds of fruit; expect roughly 4 to 5 lb.
- YieldTwo quarts of liquid before churning, so something over two quarts frozen, enough for ten or twelve small servings as sherbet was then served.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period sat between a water ice and an ice cream: fruit juice and syrup, lightened with beaten egg white or occasionally gelatin or milk, and churned in a crank freezer. Peaches were an obvious candidate: the crop came in a rush in late summer, would not keep, and the surplus went into pickles, preserves and, in households that owned a freezer and could buy ice, frozen desserts. The reliance on raw egg white for body reflects a kitchen with no commercial stabilizers and no understanding of egg-borne infection, which was not established as a food-safety concern until well into the twentieth century.