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Pineapple Water Ice or Sherbet
The same proportions as the preceding receipt Chop the pineapple small, scald it in the boiling syrup, then pound it through a strainer with the syrup and remaining quart of water into a freezer. Freeze, add 4 whites of eggs and beat it perfectly white.
A professional-kitchen water ice from the era of the hand-cranked pail freezer. The finishing step — four raw egg whites beaten into the frozen ice — is what puts it out of reach today.
- The raw whites are the problemThe four whites go into an already-frozen, already-cooled ice and are never heated at any point. Nothing in the method brings them near a pasteurizing temperature, and freezing does not kill Salmonella; it simply holds it. A current sherbet recipe should be used instead.
- Why the whites were thereBeating whites into a half-frozen ice was one recognised way of lightening a water ice into a sherbet, adding volume and a paler, softer body, at a period before commercial stabilizers and overrun-controlled machines. Modern kitchens generally get a similar effect by other means.
- The recipe is incomplete on its own"The same proportions as the preceding receipt" means the sugar and water quantities are given in the previous entry; only the 'remaining quart of water' is named here, and it appears to be part of those same proportions. Anyone reading this entry in isolation has no working syrup ratio.
- Why the pineapple is scaldedFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down proteins and is denatured by heat. Whatever the original author's reasoning, scalding in boiling syrup has the incidental effect of leaving the later egg-white foam less liable to collapse.
- "Pound it through a strainer"This means working the softened fruit through a fine sieve with a pestle to make a pulp, not straining out the solids and discarding them.
- "A freezer"Not an appliance. It is the tinned pail set inside a wooden bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, turned by hand or by crank, with the ice scraped down from the sides by a dasher.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments rather than for households, which is why the entries are terse and cross-reference each other by "the same proportions as the preceding receipt" — the reader was assumed to be working through a chapter, not opening the book at random. Water ices themselves were a hotel staple by then, served between courses at long dinners as much as at the end, and the distinction between a plain water ice and a sherbet was often exactly this: whether beaten whites had been worked in to lighten it. Pineapple on a menu still carried some of its older status as an emblem of luxury, though by this period the fruit is generally said to have been reaching northern cities from the Caribbean and Florida by steamer and rail.