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Combination (Juice of lemon cup raspberry)
Juice of 1 lemon 1/4 cup raspberry juice Juice of 1 orange 1/4 cup cherry juice 1/2 cup pineapple juice 2 cups sugar 1/4 cup currant juice 1 quart chilled milk Whites of 2 eggs Dissolve the sugar thoroughly in the fruit juice; add the milk and freeze as usual. When nearly frozen add the beaten eggs.
This is a milk sherbet of the kind that was churned in a hand-crank freezer, and the finishing step — folding in raw beaten egg whites — is the reason it cannot be made as printed.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites go in at the end of freezing and are never cooked, pasteurized, or brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not kill it; a frozen dessert simply holds it. Use pasteurized egg white, or a current sherbet recipe, if you want this flavor.
- The milk is raw too, in the original contextThe milk may have been raw in the original context -- A quart of "chilled milk" stirred cold into sugar and fruit juice may well have been unpasteurized when this was written, though pasteurized milk was also available by the early twentieth century. Modern milk is pasteurized, so that part is not the problem — but nothing in the method cooks anything, so the egg risk stands on its own.
- Why the acid mattersLemon, orange, pineapple, cherry, currant and raspberry juice added to plain milk will tend to curdle it. Sugar and constant churning help keep any curds fine enough to read as texture rather than accident. The recipe's instruction to dissolve the sugar "thoroughly" in the juice before the milk goes in may be doing that work, though the book does not say so.
- Currant juiceRed currant juice was a standard summer put-up in American households of this era and is the ingredient most likely to stop a modern cook. It is not widely sold fresh in the United States; bottled currant syrup is sweetened and not a like-for-like substitute.
- "Freeze as usual"The phrase assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked by hand for twenty minutes or more. It is shorthand a reader of the period needed no help with, and it is the only freezing instruction the recipe gives.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of finished sherbet before the whites are added — a large batch by modern standards, sized for a family table or a church supper.
Milk sherbets like this one sat between water ice and ice cream: cheaper than a custard, richer than a plain fruit ice, and a way to use up the bottled and canned juices that a well-run household had on hand. The bare title "Combination" looks like the period's own filing system: by this account, cookbooks tended to group frozen desserts by structure (water ice, sherbet, mousse, frozen pudding) and then distinguish individual recipes by their fruit, so a recipe drawing on six juices at once got no more distinctive name than that. Raw beaten egg white stirred in near the end was standard practice across the genre, credited with lightening the body and keeping the texture from going coarse; the technique survived in print long after refrigeration gradually displaced the small hand freezer, and long after the food-safety understanding that rules it out today.