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Orange Sherbet
One gallon water, twelve oranges, juice of three lemons, whites of six eggs. Rub some lumps of sugar on the orange peel. Mix as lemon sherbet, and freeze.--Mrs. M.
A fragment rather than a full recipe: it leans on a neighbouring lemon sherbet entry for its method and gives no sugar weight at all. It also relies on raw egg whites in a mixture that is never heated.
- Raw egg whites, never cookedThe six whites go into a cold mixture that is chilled and frozen, never brought to any temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not destroy the organism, and the whites are what lighten the sherbet, so leaving them out changes the result. If you want a citrus sherbet, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white, meringue powder, or no egg at all.
- No sugar quantitySugar is mentioned only as "some lumps" rubbed on the peel. A gallon of water with the juice of twelve oranges and three lemons would need something on the order of two to three pounds of sugar to taste sweet and to freeze to a scoopable texture rather than a block of ice. The original assumes the cook will take the proportion from the lemon sherbet recipe it refers to.
- "Mix as lemon sherbet"Nineteenth-century cookbooks chained recipes together like this constantly. The lemon sherbet entry it points to is not reproduced here, so the page is unusable on its own.
- Rubbing sugar on the peelThis is the old oleo-saccharum trick, and it is the one genuinely good idea here. Loaf sugar dragged over the skin of the fruit picks up the peel oil, which carries far more orange aroma than the juice does. A modern cook gets the same effect by muddling zest with granulated sugar and letting it stand.
- Freezing meant a pail and rock salt"Freeze" here means a freezer set in a tub of pounded ice and coarse salt, worked and scraped until set. Ice had to come from an ice house or a commercial ice supplier.
- YieldA gallon of liquid plus juice, sugar and air makes something on the order of five quarts of finished sherbet — twenty or more servings. This is a quantity for entertaining.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one closes with "Mrs. M." rather than a signature. Sherbet reached English by a long route: Arabic sharba/sharbah, a drink, into Persian sharbat, a sweetened fruit cordial, and then Turkish, entering European usage first as a chilled beverage and only later as a frozen one. In nineteenth-century American usage the word could still mean a cold drink as well as a water ice, the frozen kind often lightened with beaten egg white and made without cream. Its appearance in a Virginia household book suggests a family with access to ice and to imported citrus, which would put a frozen orange sherbet among the things served to guests.