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Pineapple Snow
Three-quarter ounce granulated gelatin, 1 quart simple syrup, 4 quarts water, 6 lemons, 2 eggs, i quart milk, 1 pint American Crushed Pineapple, 1 pint American Pineapple Syrup. Dissolve the granulated gelatin in a quart of hot water. Mix thoroughly 1 quart simple syrup, 3 quarts of water, and the gelatin solution, add the lemon juice. Beat the whites only of the eggs, and mix with the milk. Stir the eggs and milk thoroughly into the mixture and put in freezer and freeze till almost hard, add 1 pint American Crushed Pineapple, and 1 pint American Pineapple Concentrated Syrup and freeze very hard. Serve in a sherbet glass with a spoon.
A soda-fountain sherbet scaled for a shop, not a household, and built on an uncooked egg-white base that current food-safety practice rules out.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites go into the mixture raw and the whole thing is frozen; nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria rather than destroying them, so a batch of this size sitting in a fountain cabinet and served over hours is exactly the situation modern guidance is written against. A current sherbet or sorbet recipe using pasteurized product should be followed instead.
- The milk is unheated tooA quart of fluid milk is stirred in cold and frozen; like the egg white, it never reaches a temperature that would pasteurize it.
- "American" is a brand, not a variety"American" looks like a brand, not a variety -- American Crushed Pineapple and American Pineapple Concentrated Syrup appear to be named proprietary fountain products rather than descriptions of fruit. The second is specified as a concentrated syrup, so it would be sweeter and heavier than plain canned pineapple juice.
- Simple syrup at the fountainDispensers' simple syrup was generally heavier than a modern 1:1 bar syrup, so substituting 1:1 would leave the mixture somewhat thinner and less sweet than the formula intends.
- Granulated gelatinThree-quarters of an ounce is roughly three envelopes of modern powdered gelatin, used here to keep the ice smooth and slow to melt in the glass rather than to set it.
- ScaleSomething over six quarts of liquid before the fruit goes in, which comes close to two gallons of finished ice: forty or more sherbet glasses. This was written for a shop, not a household.
- "Freeze till almost hard"The instruction refers to a hand- or belt-driven ice-and-salt freezer, where the mix is churned to a stiff slush, the fruit worked in, and the can then packed in salt and ice to harden. It is not a two-stage still-freezing method.
The American soda fountain was a small manufactory as much as a counter: the dispenser made his own syrups, carbonated his own water, and froze his own ices, and trade manuals of this kind were often issued by syrup and fruit houses to sell their branded ingredients along with the formulas. A "snow" generally meant a frozen fruit ice lightened with beaten egg white; the addition of milk here pushes it toward the milk sherbets that fountains sold as a cheaper, softer alternative to ice cream. Pineapple was a fountain staple because canned crushed pineapple and pineapple concentrate kept well and gave a flavor that fresh fruit could not supply year-round in a northern city. The gelatin looks practical rather than culinary: it would help keep the ice from collapsing into syrup while a glass stood on the counter.