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Cream Sherbet
Three quarts water, four lemons, whites of six eggs, one pound and two ounces sugar, one pint sweet cream. Mix one-half the sugar with the cream and eggs, which must be beaten to a stiff froth; mix the rest of the sugar with the water and lemons. Mix all together just before freezing.--Mrs. A. P.
This is an uncooked frozen dessert built on raw egg white, and that is where it fails for a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the problem and decode the rest of the ingredient list.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites of six eggs are whipped and then frozen with the other ingredients. Nothing in the method brings them above room temperature, and freezing does not kill Salmonella — it simply preserves whatever is present. There is no step at any point that reaches a safe temperature.
- Volume makes it worseThree quarts of water plus a pint of cream is close to a gallon of finished sherbet, held frozen and eaten over days. A large batch of an uncooked egg-white mixture, softening and refreezing as it is served, is exactly the situation food-safety guidance is written against.
- The cream is also uncookedNineteenth-century "sweet cream" meant fresh, unsoured cream, but it was not necessarily pasteurised. Combined with raw whites in a mixture that will sit in a freezer, there is no kill step for either component.
- If you want this dessertUse a current recipe for lemon sherbet or lemon-milk sherbet, or one built on a cooked meringue or pasteurised egg whites. We are not offering a corrected version of this one.
- Reading the quantitiesFor context rather than for use: one pound two ounces of sugar is a little over two and a half cups, and "one pint sweet cream" is two cups of ordinary heavy or light cream. Four lemons means the juice, with no indication of whether the zest was included.
- "Just before freezing"The instruction points to a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, a metal canister packed in ice and coarse salt and turned by hand, the usual apparatus in a household of this date. Why the recipe is built as two separate mixtures is not stated; keeping the beaten whites from standing and deflating is one plausible reason, and keeping the lemon juice away from the cream until the last moment is another.
Sherbets in American cookbooks of this period sit between the water ice and the ice cream: mostly fruit juice, sugar and water, lightened with a little dairy or beaten egg white to keep the texture from setting hard as a block. Whipped whites were one common household means to that end, long before commercial stabilisers. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of such signed fragments — this one credited only to "Mrs. A. P." — and the number of frozen desserts in it suggests how far the crank freezer and the seasonal ice house had settled into a comfortable Southern household by the 1870s. Lemons, shipped up from the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, were the reliable year-round acid for these ices at a time when most other fruit was strictly seasonal.