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London Sherbet
3 pints of water. 1 1/2 pints of wine--port or any sweet kind. 2 pounds of sugar. 4 oranges. 2 lemons. 8 ounces of sultana seedless raisins. 8 whites of eggs. Nutmeg. Red fruit juice or other coloring.
Make a syrup of the sugar and water and pour it hot upon the oranges and lemons all cut up in a bowl, and the raisins and half a nutmeg with them. When cool strain the syrup into a freezer, add the wine and coloring to make it pink, and freeze and beat up with the whites of eggs as usual. Add the fruit slices at last and mix them in without breaking. Only good thin-skinned fruit can be used this way. Exclude the seeds lest the sherbet be bitter.
A water ice in the older English sense: a wine-based syrup lightened with meringue. The lightening is the problem, because the whites of eight eggs go into a cold mixture and are never cooked.
- Raw whites in a frozen dessertEight uncooked whites are beaten in as the sherbet freezes and the mixture never rises above freezing point at any stage. Uncooked meringue folded into ices and mousses is a documented vehicle for Salmonella, and freezing preserves rather than destroys it. Use a current sherbet or sorbet recipe if you want this style of dessert.
- Why the alcohol does not helpThree pints of water and two pounds of sugar against a pint and a half of sweet or fortified wine leaves the finished mix somewhere around four to six percent alcohol, depending on the wine chosen. Either way it is nowhere near enough to make the raw whites safe, and it is low enough that the sherbet will still freeze hard.
- Long holding at serving temperatureA batch this size comes to roughly three quarts. The recipe gives no instruction about how long the finished sherbet is held, but a protein-containing mixture kept for hours at the edge of melting is the worst case for an uncooked egg product.
- What the ingredients would have meant"Any sweet kind" of wine could cover port, sherry, madeira or a sweet marsala. "Red fruit juice or other coloring" would most likely have meant cochineal or one of the newer coal-tar dyes; a modern kitchen would reach for beet or berry juice.
- The bitterness warning is soundPouring hot syrup over cut citrus draws limonin out of the seeds and pith, which can turn sharply bitter as the mixture stands and cools. The instruction to exclude the seeds and use only thin-skinned fruit is the one piece of technique here worth remembering.
Sherbet in this period was not the milky supermarket product but a descendant of the Ottoman and Persian sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink that reached western Europe by way of Italy in the seventeenth century and was gradually frozen. By the late nineteenth century confectionery writing commonly distinguished ices (fruit and sugar only), sherbets (an ice lightened with beaten whites or gelatine) and punches (the same with wine or spirit added), and this recipe sits between the last two. The "London" in the name is not explained here; city names of this sort, like Roman punch or Neapolitan ice, were often used to label one wine-and-citrus formula against another rather than to claim an origin. The beaten whites give body and air to a mixture frozen by hand.