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Pineapple Ice
3 pints water 1 pound sugar 1 pineapple Juice of 2 lemons Whites of 2 eggs Boil the sugar and water; add the grated pineapple and lemon; strain through a fine sieve and freeze. When partly frozen add the whites of eggs well beaten.
A straightforward boiled-syrup water ice, with one step that current food-safety practice rules out: raw egg whites beaten into a mixture that is already frozen and will never be heated again.
- The raw whites are the problemThe syrup is boiled, but it is cooled and frozen before the whites go in, so the egg protein never reaches any temperature at all. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it. Anything served to children, older eaters, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised should not contain uncooked shell egg, and a current sorbet or granita recipe should be used instead.
- Why the whites were thereBeaten whites were a common period device for lightening a water ice churned in a bucket freezer, adding air and breaking up coarse ice crystals. Modern recipes get the same effect from a cooked Italian meringue, pasteurized whites, or simply a well-balanced sugar syrup and a machine that churns faster.
- Sugar to water ratioOne pound of sugar to three pints of water is about 2 cups sugar to 6 cups liquid, before the fruit. That is a fairly lean syrup by modern standards, which is part of why the mixture would set hard and gritty without aeration.
- "Grated pineapple"The fruit is grated raw on a box grater over a bowl to catch the juice, then the whole lot is pushed through a sieve. A blender or food processor plus a fine strainer does the same job; a whole pineapple yields roughly 2 to 3 cups of pulp and juice.
- Freezing equipment"Freeze" here means a hand-cranked churn packed with ice and rock salt, which is why the recipe assumes you can stop partway through and stir something in. In a modern machine, "partly frozen" is the slushy stage a few minutes before the churn finishes.
- YieldThree pints of syrup plus a pineapple gives roughly two quarts of finished ice, depending on how much air the churn works in.
Water ices were long established in American cookbooks, and by the late nineteenth century commercial ice delivery and the salt-and-ice bucket freezer had put frozen desserts within reach of a middle-class kitchen with strong arms. Pineapple, once a rare luxury, had become a fruit a city cook could buy whole, and it appears constantly in turn-of-the-century dessert chapters. The beaten-white finish belongs to a family of period ices variously called sherbets, frappe or sorbet, the terms used loosely and inconsistently from book to book.