Home › Frozen Dishes › Plain Water Ice
Plain Water Ice
2 cups water 1 cup sugar 4 egg whites flavoring Boil sugar and water; beat until cold. Add egg whites beaten until stiff and flavoring. Freeze.
A sugar syrup lightened with beaten egg whites and frozen — in period terms nearer a sorbet or frappé than a true water ice. The problem is the eggs: nothing in the method ever heats them.
- The whites are never cookedThe syrup is boiled and then beaten until cold before the whites go in, so the egg is never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not kill it either; it simply holds it dormant. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or a cooked Italian-meringue method should be used instead.
- Why the confusion is easySome ice and sherbet recipes pour hot syrup onto the whipped whites, which heats them at least partly. This one specifically does not, and the order of operations is the whole difference.
- What the whites are doingThey are not flavour. Egg white foam helps keep the ice from freezing into a solid block in a hand-cranked freezer, giving a lighter, fluffier body. A plain water ice proper is only syrup, water and flavouring.
- "Freeze" meant a churnIn 1907 this meant an ice-and-salt bucket freezer, packed roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, cranked until stiff and then left to ripen an hour or two. It does not mean setting the bowl in a freezer compartment, which most kitchens did not have.
- Flavouring is left entirely openNo quantity is given: lemon or orange juice, a vanilla or almond extract, a fruit purée; the juice would also replace part of the water, which the recipe does not say.
- Syrup strengthTwo parts water to one part sugar by volume is a fairly light syrup by modern sorbet standards, and this proportion freezes hard. The beaten whites were the period's answer to that.
- YieldRoughly three cups of syrup before the whites go in; the whites add considerable volume, so figure six to eight small servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounds its chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire. Frozen dishes get their own section, and a book of this date can assume a reader owns a crank freezer, ice having become cheap through the ice trade. The distinction the section is drawing on is an old one: ice creams contain dairy, water ices contain none, and sherbets sit between, lightened with gelatine, dissolved gum or — as here — beaten egg white. The name "plain" signals that no fruit pulp or cream is involved; the flavouring is left to the cook, which is why the ingredient list simply says "flavoring" and stops.