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Lemon Ice
3 pints water Juice of 6 lemons 3 cups sugar Whites of 2 eggs Let the sugar and water boil together for ten minutes; add the lemon juice; strain and cool. whites of the eggs.
When partly frozen add the beaten
A plain water ice of the old school, but the two egg whites go in raw and are never heated at any point, which is why this one belongs on the shelf as a historical document rather than in the freezer.
- The raw egg whites are the problemThe sugar syrup is boiled, then cooled, and the beaten whites are folded into the half-frozen ice. Nothing after that reaches any temperature at all — freezing does not kill Salmonella, it only halts its growth, and the whites are eaten essentially raw. Use a current sorbet or ice recipe if you want this flavour.
- Why the whites were thereBefore stabilisers and fast home freezers, beaten egg white was one common way to keep a water ice from setting into a solid block of lemon-flavoured ice. It adds foam and body, not flavour.
- The garbled textThe last line of the original has been transposed in the printing: the instruction reads "add the beaten whites of the eggs" when the ice is partly frozen. Nothing is missing, only the order of the words.
- Proportions, for the recordThree pints of water, three cups of sugar and the juice of six lemons is roughly two parts water to one part sugar by volume with about a cup of juice — a sweet, sharp ice by modern taste. Six average lemons yield close to a cup.
- YieldAround two quarts before churning, so eight to ten servings. The recipe names no equipment, but 'partly frozen' points to a churned ice — the stage when the mixture has thickened at the sides of the can but is not yet firm.
Water ices — sugar syrup, fruit juice, no dairy — were the older and cheaper half of the frozen dessert repertoire, and lemon was the most common of them because citrus juice keeps and the flavour survives freezing, which dulls almost everything else. Making them at home meant a crank freezer and a supply of ice; mechanical household refrigeration was not general until the 1920s and 30s. The trick of folding in beaten egg white part way through the churning is much older than the book, and it was passed along for a long time without much comment on the fact that the egg was never cooked.