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Raspberry Ice
One ounce granulated gelatin, 1 quart simple syrup, 4 quarts water, 6 lemons, 2 eggs, 1 quart crushed raspberry. Dissolve the granulated gelatin in a quart of hot water. Mix thoroughly i quart simple syrup, 3 quarts of water and the gelatin solution. Add lemon juice, beat the whites only of the eggs, stir thoroughly into the mixture. Put in freezer and freeze until almost hard, add i quart American Crushed Raspberry. Freeze very hard and serve in a sherbet glass with a spoon.
A soda fountain formula, written for a dispenser working in bulk with a hand- or motor-cranked ice cream freezer. The proportions are sound, but one step does not survive modern food safety practice.
- The raw egg whitesTwo beaten whites are stirred into a cold mixture and then frozen; nothing in the process brings them near a safe temperature, and freezing does not kill Salmonella. The quart of hot gelatin water is diluted into four more quarts of cold liquid long before the eggs go in, so there is no pasteurizing step at all. Use a current sherbet recipe written for pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
- What the whites were forThey are an aerator and body-builder, not a flavour. Fountain ices were churned hard and served hours later, and the beaten white kept the texture light and slowed the formation of coarse ice crystals.
- Simple syrupFountain syrup of the period was often heavier than the bar syrup sold today; published formulas vary, but many run well above one part sugar to one part water, boiled and strained. A modern 1:1 syrup will give a noticeably thinner, icier result.
- Granulated gelatinOne ounce is roughly four quarter-ounce envelopes. It acts as the stabilizer here, doing the job later handled by commercial gums; it needs to be bloomed in cool water briefly before the hot water goes on, or it will lump.
- "American Crushed Raspberry"The capitalisation points to a trade crushed-fruit pack, heavily sweetened and preserved, of the kind supplied to soda dispensers. A quart of fresh crushed raspberries is far less sweet and far more watery, so the finished ice would be both tarter and harder.
- ScaleFive quarts of base plus a quart of fruit makes roughly six quarts, some forty to fifty sherbet-glass servings. This is a day's production for a counter, not a household batch.
- "Freeze until almost hard"In a salt-and-ice churn this would be about the point at which the paddle begins to labour, before the final hard freeze that follows the fruit.
Books like this one were trade manuals, sold to druggists and fountain men rather than to home cooks — the American drugstore soda fountain was at its height in the first decades of the twentieth century, and a dispenser was expected to turn out ices, sherbets, phosphates and sundaes from standardised formulas. The distinction the trade drew was that an ice contained no dairy, only syrup, water, fruit and often gelatin or beaten white for body, while a sherbet might carry milk and an ice cream certainly did. Raspberry was among the staple fountain fruits, and it was commonly sold to the trade as branded crushed-fruit packs in gallon tins. The gelatin here is doing quiet technical work: before modern stabilizers, it was one of the common ways to keep a large batch of water ice from turning to gravel in the holding cabinet.