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Lemon Sherbet
Take one dozen lemons, squeeze out the juice, then slice the rind and pour over it six quarts boiling water. Mix three pounds sugar with the lemon juice, and one quart milk, brought to a boil and thickened with three tablespoonfuls arrow-root or corn-starch. Be careful to remove all the seed and most of the rind, leaving only a few slices to make the dish pretty. After the lemonade begins to freeze, stir in the thickened milk, and the whites of six eggs beaten very light.
Lemon Sherbet.
One dozen good lemons, whites of twelve eggs beaten stiff, three pounds white sugar, one gallon water. Stir all well together and add one quart nice fresh cream. Stir often while freezing.--Miss E. T.
Lemon Sherbet.
Two quarts water, four large lemons, one pound and a half sugar, whites of six eggs. Rub some lumps of sugar on the rind of the lemons. Powder some of the sugar, beat it with the whites of the eggs, and mix with the lemonade when it begins to freeze.--Mrs. M.
A new Recipe for Lemon Sherbet.
Make one and a half gallon rather acid lemonade, grating the peel of three or four of the lemons before straining the juice into the water. Let it stand fifteen minutes. Then make and add to it the following mixture: pour a pint cold water over one box gelatine and let it stand half an hour; then pour over it one pint boiling water, and let it stand till thoroughly dissolved. Beat the whites of eight eggs with two pounds pulverized sugar till as thick as icing; then churn a quart rich cream till it is reduced to a pint; then beat the froth of the cream into the egg and sugar. Pour in gradually the lemonade, beating all the time so as to mix thoroughly, and then freeze. Delicious.--Mrs. F. C. W.
Four versions of the same dessert, collected from four contributors. All of them finish by folding raw, unheated egg white into the freezing mixture, which is why none of them should be made as printed.
- Raw egg white, never cookedIn every version here the beaten whites go in cold, at the point where the sherbet is already freezing, and nothing in the process brings them near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not pasteurise; it preserves. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- The uncooked cream, tooMrs. F. C. W.'s version whips a quart of raw cream down to a pint and beats the froth into the egg-and-sugar base, with no heating step; Miss E. T.'s version likewise stirs in a quart of fresh cream unheated. Households of the period would often have been using milk from a cow they knew, only hours old; whatever assumption lies behind the recipe, it does not hold for modern supply.
- Why the sugar and acid do not rescue itThere is a tradition that lemon juice and heavy sugar make such a mixture safe. Acid at this dilution — a dozen lemons in six quarts of water — does not reliably reduce pathogens in egg white, and sugar concentration in a frozen sherbet is far too low to act as a preservative.
- What the quantities tell youThese are party volumes: six quarts of water in the first version, a gallon in Miss E. T.'s, a gallon and a half in the last. Each would more than fill a large hand-cranked freezer. Three pounds of sugar to a dozen lemons is something close to seven cups.
- The vanished ingredient"One box gelatine" meant a commercial box of sheet or granulated gelatine of the period, which was substantially larger than a modern quarter-ounce envelope, though box weights varied. This is one of the genuinely ambiguous measurements in the book and cannot be converted with confidence.
- Sherbet versus sorbetThe first version's boiled milk thickened with arrowroot, and the cream in the others, mark these as sherbets in the American sense — a fruit ice carrying some dairy — rather than a water ice. Arrowroot and cornstarch are used interchangeably here as thickeners for the milk.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in the late 1870s, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears four times over with four different balances of egg, cream and water — the book records what particular households contributed rather than settling on one method. Lemon was among the workhorse flavours of nineteenth-century American ices: citrus travelled well by ship and rail, and the fruit's acidity gave a bright result that did not depend on a dairy base. Frozen desserts in this period were made in a pail-and-crank freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, and the instruction to "stir often while freezing" is doing the work a modern machine's dasher does continuously — without it the mixture sets into a coarse block rather than a fine-grained ice. The beaten egg whites, added late, kept the texture light and held air in a mixture that had no custard to give it body.