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We Three Sherbet
Dissolve over the stove three cups of sugar in three cups of water; when cool into this put three bananas, three oranges and one pineapple. Add the juice of three lemons. When it begins to freeze add the whites of two eggs, well beaten. Put the bananas through the colander and chop the other fruits fine.
A three-of-everything fruit sherbet from the hand-cranked freezer era. The fruit and syrup are straightforward; the finishing step is not, and it governs whether the recipe can be made at all today.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe beaten whites go in partway through churning and are never heated at any point. Egg white stirred into a cold, acidic, sugary base is not pasteurized by the acid or by freezing, and Salmonella survives in the freezer rather than being killed there. A current frozen-dessert recipe should be used instead.
- Freezing is not a kill stepChilling and hard-freezing suspend bacterial growth; they do not reduce the number of organisms already present. Anything unsafe going into the canister is still unsafe coming out, and this mixture is served without further cooking.
- "When it begins to freeze"This assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, where the cook can lift the lid and judge the slush by eye. There is no time given and none can be inferred, so the instruction carries no useful information for a modern machine.
- The syrup ratioEqual parts sugar and water by volume gives a fairly heavy syrup, and the sugar level points to a sweet, soft-freezing sherbet rather than a firm ice. The finished volume cannot be pinned down, since the recipe gives no size for the pineapple or the oranges.
- Order of operations in the originalThe fruit preparation, sieving the bananas and chopping the oranges and pineapple fine, is described in the last sentence but has to happen before the fruit goes into the cooled syrup. Read the recipe through before starting.
- Pineapple and gelatinFresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that breaks down protein. It is harmless in a sherbet like this one, but it is the reason fresh pineapple defeats gelatin-set desserts of the same period.
The name is a straight count: three cups of sugar, three cups of water, three bananas, three oranges, three lemons, with a pineapple to hold them together. The recipe belongs to the era of the hand-cranked household freezer, packed with ice and rock salt, when a cook needed no explanation of what "when it begins to freeze" meant. The beaten egg white is what makes this a sherbet rather than a water ice in the American usage of the day: sherbets were lightened either with white of egg or with a little milk, giving a softer, less crystalline texture than a plain fruit ice.