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Lemon Cream Sherbet
1 1/2 cups sugar 2 cups boiling water 2 lemons, juice rind of 1 lemon 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 egg yolks, well beaten 2 cups cream, beaten stiff 2 egg whites, beaten stiff Dissolve sugar in boiling water, add grated rind and juice of fruit and salt. Pour gradually over egg yolks, then cool and freeze to a mushy consistency in refrigerator pan. Add sugar to cream, then the egg whites, fold into half frozen mixture and continue freezing for about 5 hours. Serves eight to ten.
This is a still-frozen sherbet from the era of the first mechanical refrigerators, and it depends on raw and barely warmed egg that no later step ever cooks.
- The eggs are never cookedHot syrup poured gradually over two beaten yolks brings them nowhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella; the mixture is then deliberately cooled rather than held or stirred over heat. The two whites go in raw, and freezing does not destroy pathogens. Anyone wanting a lemon cream sherbet should use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs.
- "Refrigerator pan"This means the shallow metal ice tray in the freezing compartment of an early household electric refrigerator. Such compartments ran warmer than a modern freezer, so the mushy stage the recipe calls for lasted longer; a modern freezer at 0F will pass that stage sooner and may set the mixture hard well inside the stated five hours.
- Beaten cream, not whipped topping"2 cups cream, beaten stiff" is best read as two cups of heavy cream, measured before beating, whipped to stiff peaks. It is folded in for volume, since there is no churn or dasher to break up ice crystals.
- Sugar is used twiceThe list gives 1 1/2 cups, all of it dissolved in the boiling water at the start, yet the method later calls for sugar to be added to the cream without naming an amount. The quantity for the cream is genuinely unspecified in the original.
- Sherbet, in the American senseAmerican sherbets of this kind commonly included dairy, unlike a sorbet. With two cups of cream to two lemons, this one sits closer to a frozen mousse than to an ice.
- YieldThe recipe states eight to ten servings.
Refrigerator desserts were a selling point of the late 1920s and 1930s, when electric refrigerators with a small freezing compartment reached ordinary kitchens alongside the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Because the new compartments had no moving dasher, recipes of this period leaned on beaten cream and stiff egg whites to keep the texture from turning to a solid block of ice -- the air folded in did the work that churning used to do. Sections of refrigerator recipes and menus appeared in manufacturers' booklets and modern-style menu books to show off the appliance.