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Grape Juice Sherbet
Sweeten i quart grape juice to taste, add ½ pound sugar to the juice of 6 oranges, stir till sugar dissolves, mix together and freeze slowly. Beat the white of an egg, adding a tablespoonful powdered sugar and stir into sherbet, repack and set aside for 2 hours. Serve in sherbet cups.
A fountain-counter sherbet from the era when a soda clerk kept an egg crate under the marble. The freezing and sweetening are straightforward; the finishing step is the problem.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is stirred into an already-frozen mixture and then held cold for two hours. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella; freezing preserves the bacteria rather than destroying them. The risk was not understood when this was written.
- Why the acid does not helpIt is sometimes assumed that grape and orange juice make the mixture too acidic to be a hazard. They do not — the pH of a sweetened fruit sherbet is nowhere near low enough to render raw egg white safe, and the sugar and dilution work against it.
- If you want this dishUse a current grape sherbet recipe from a modern source. Egg white in frozen desserts is a texture device, and contemporary formulas achieve the same lightness by other means.
- The measurements, for readingA quart is 4 cups; a half pound of sugar is a generous cup. Note the odd phrasing — the half pound of sugar goes into the orange juice, and the grape juice is sweetened separately "to taste," so the total sugar is left to the operator's judgement.
- "Freeze slowly" and "repack"Both refer to a hand-crank freezer packed in ice and coarse salt. Slower freezing produces larger ice crystals and so a coarser, more granular ice; repacking meant burying the sealed can in fresh ice and salt to harden.
- YieldPerhaps a quart and a half once churned; the recipe gives no yield or serving count.
The American Soda Book belongs to a large family of trade manuals written for drugstore fountain men, who were expected to turn out ices and sherbets as well as phosphates and syrups. Grape juice had a particular place at the fountain: unfermented bottled juice was promoted heavily by temperance-minded producers from the late nineteenth century onward, and the soda fountain was its natural retail home — a place to buy something festive without buying drink. The egg-white finish was one way of turning a hard fruit ice into something that scooped soft and looked twice as large in the cup.