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Fruit Sherbet
Juice of 3 lemons and 1 orange, ½ cup of shredded pineapple, 2¼ cups of sugar and 1 quart water. Boil water and several splices of lemon and orange peel 10 minutes; cool, add juice of lemons and orange and the shredded pineapple; freeze. When almost frozen add beaten white of 1 egg.
A plain water-ice of the type churned in a hand-cranked freezer, with an egg-white meringue beaten in at the end to lighten it. That last step is the problem: the egg white is added to a mixture that is already near freezing and is never heated at any point.
- The raw egg whiteNothing in this recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not kill it either — it simply holds it dormant until the sherbet is eaten. Use a current sherbet recipe written for pasteurized egg white or a cooked meringue.
- "21/4 cups of sugar"A printer's rendering of 2¼ cups. Sugar in a water ice is structural, not just sweetening — cut it much below that and the mixture freezes to a solid block rather than a scoopable ice.
- "Several splices of lemon and orange peel"Read as slices, meaning pared strips of zest. Take the coloured outer layer only; ten minutes of boiling will pull bitterness out of any white pith that comes with it.
- Freezing method"Freeze" here means a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, cranked until the mixture thickens. In a modern ice cream machine the same volume needs roughly 25-35 minutes; still-frozen in a shallow pan it wants scraping with a fork every 30 minutes and comes out closer to a granita.
- Shredded pineappleShredded here means pineapple reduced to fine threads rather than cut in cubes, which stay suspended in the ice. Canned pineapple in juice is a reasonable stand-in; drained crushed pineapple is closest in texture.
- YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 quarts before churning, so eight to ten small servings. Sherbet of this kind was served both between courses and as a dessert.
In American cookbooks of this period "sherbet" and "water ice" were nearly interchangeable terms for a frozen fruit mixture with no cream in it; the distinction from a sorbet — often said to lie in the beaten egg white or gelatine that gave it body — is a later formalisation, and period usage was inconsistent. The word itself traces back through Turkish şerbet to Arabic sharba, a drink, and the earliest versions were chilled sweetened fruit drinks rather than frozen desserts. That a cookbook could assume access to pineapple alongside lemons and oranges says a good deal: refrigerated rail cars and steamship traffic from the Caribbean, along with Florida growing, had turned fresh pineapple from a luxury centrepiece into an ordinary grocery item within a generation, and shredded canned pineapple was on the market as well. The ice was the harder part to come by, and recipes of this kind belong to the brief era when commercial ice delivery had reached ordinary kitchens but mechanical refrigeration had not.