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Lemon Sherbet
1 qt. water 1 1/2 cups sugar 3/4 cup lemon juice 1 egg white, beaten stiff Make a syrup of boiling water, sugar and lemon juice. Cool, strain and freeze. When half frozen, add the beaten egg white, and pack. Serves 8.
A plain water ice built on a lemon syrup, with beaten egg white folded in partway through churning to lighten the texture. The egg white is the problem: it goes into a cold mixture and is never heated at any point.
- Why the egg white failsThe syrup is boiled, but it is cooled and frozen before the raw white is added. Nothing in the method brings the egg above about 40F afterward, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg survives intact. Freezing does not kill it; a frozen dessert simply holds it. Use a current recipe if you want a sherbet of this type.
- Acid is not a safeguardThe lemon juice is diluted into a quart of syrup, and in any case acidity of this order should not be relied on to inactivate pathogens in a raw egg white.
- What "pack" meantIn period usage the instruction refers to packing the churned sherbet into a container surrounded by fresh crushed ice and rock salt, to ripen and firm before serving; the recipe itself says nothing about the equipment used.
- The syrup itselfOne quart water to 1 1/2 cups sugar is a lean syrup by modern standards, and a mixture this thin tends to freeze hard and coarse; the beaten white would have helped with texture, though the recipe does not say that is its purpose.
- YieldEight servings from roughly a quart and a half of unfrozen mixture works out to about six ounces apiece. Sherbets of this period were often served as a course between heavier dishes rather than as a dessert on their own.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this era often meant something narrower than it does now: a water ice sharpened with citrus, sometimes given a little body by milk, gelatin, or as here a beaten egg white, and served in small glasses between courses. A crank freezer full of ice and rock salt was a good deal of work, and a course whose purpose was to interrupt a long meal made most sense when there was a long meal to interrupt. Beaten egg white was one of the devices used to keep an ice from freezing into a solid block, and it appears in ice and sherbet recipes well before the shell egg was thought of as a hazard.