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London Sherbet
1/3 cup seeded and finely cut raisins ¾ cup orange juice 3 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup fruit syrup ¼ grated nutmeg 1/4 cup port wine Whites 3 eggs Make syrup by boiling water and sugar ten minutes; pour over raisins, cool, and add fruit syrup and nutmeg; freeze to a mush, then add wine and whites of eggs beaten stiff, and continue freezing. Serve in glasses. Fruit syrup may be used which has been left from canned peaches, pears, or strawberries. 2 cups water 2 cups sugar
A late-Victorian water ice stretched with canning syrup and stiffened with uncooked egg white. The recipe is readable enough, but the finishing step puts raw egg into a mixture that is never heated afterward.
- Why the cautionThe whites of three eggs are beaten stiff and folded into a partly frozen sherbet, then simply frozen harder. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing preserves rather than destroys it. Use a current recipe if you want a meringue-lightened ice.
- The scrambled ingredient listThe 4 cups water and 2 cups sugar printed at the end belong at the top: they are the syrup boiled ten minutes and poured over the raisins. The stray "14 grated nutmeg" is a typesetting casualty of "1/4 grated nutmeg" — a quarter of a whole nutmeg, roughly half a teaspoon grated.
- Fruit syrupThis means the sweet canning liquid drained from home-put-up peaches, pears or strawberries, as the recipe's closing line says: a thrift measure in a household that bottled its own fruit.
- "Freeze to a mush"The original assumes a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt, where the mixture passes through a slushy stage that can be opened up and stirred. A modern churn passes through the same stage partway through its cycle.
- Sherbet, 1896 senseIn this book a sherbet is a water ice with beaten egg white worked in for body; there is no dairy at all. It is not the milky American sherbet of the mid-twentieth century.
- Alcohol and freezingThe port goes in only after the mixture has frozen to a mush, along with the egg whites. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so wine stirred in at the start would make the mixture slower to set.
Fannie Farmer's ices chapter — an attribution the page itself does not establish, though the recipe is consistent with it — belongs to a moment when ice was cheap and reliably delivered, and the hand-crank freezer had come within reach of home cooks, so the frozen course moved from confectioner's luxury to home cookery. "London sherbet" is a fancy-name dish rather than a documented English one: the port and nutmeg gesture at an older English drinking tradition — negus and mulled wine drew on much the same flavourings — served cold instead of hot. The instruction to use the syrup left from canned peaches or pears is the more revealing detail, marking a book written for households that preserved their own fruit and were not about to pour the syrup down the sink.