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Orange Sherbet
1 egg. 1 quart milk. 1 pint cream. Juice and grated rind of 3 oranges Juice and grated rind of 1 lemon 2½ cups sugar Dissolve Beat the egg lightly and add it to the milk and cream. the sugar thoroughly with the lemon and orange; mix with the other ingredients and freeze.
This page has come through the scanner badly: the ingredient list is truncated and the method sentences have been transposed, so the milk, cream and egg are called for in the directions but never quantified. Beyond the missing amounts, the dish is a raw-egg frozen mixture, which is why it should not be made from this text.
- Raw egg, never heatedThe egg is beaten lightly into the dairy and the whole mixture goes straight into the freezer. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; a shell egg that is never brought above about 160F simply carries whatever it started with into the finished sherbet. Custard-style frozen desserts today are cooked to temperature first, and this one is not.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given for the milk, cream or egg, and the ratio of dairy to the 2 1/2 cups sugar governs whether the result freezes at all. There is not enough information on the page to reconstruct the recipe with any confidence.
- Citrus and dairyOrange and lemon juice at this strength will curdle milk. The original directs that the sugar be dissolved thoroughly with the lemon and orange before mixing with the other ingredients, but gives no reason for it. Expect the mixture to separate into flecks.
- The freezer meant a crank churn"Freeze" in an American cookbook of this era means a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned until set. A still-frozen mixture in a modern tray behaves nothing like it, being coarse and hard rather than smooth.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for orange sherbet or orange ice, either eggless or with a cooked base.
Loose-leaf cookbooks issued as ring binders or boxed sheets, so that a housewife could interleave her own cards, were a recognisable format in early twentieth-century America. The word sherbet reaches English through Turkish "serbet" and Arabic "sharbah", a sweetened drink, and in American usage of this period it had come to mean a fruit ice loosened with milk, cream, egg or gelatine, as distinct from a plain water ice and from an egg custard ice cream. Refrigerated rail cars had by this date widened the northern market for Florida and California citrus, and orange juice and grated rind appear freely in cookbooks of the period.