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Pineapple Sherbet
1 quart water
2 cups shredded pineapple, fresh or canned
2 cups sugar
I lemon
2 egg-whites
Boil water and sugar together for five minutes. Chop pineapple (it may be put through a food-chopper if a pan is put below to catch the juice), scald it in the boiling sirup, and rub through a sieve. Cool, add lemon-juice and freeze to a mush. Add the beaten whites of the eggs and continue freezing.
A water ice stretched with meringue, from the era when every kitchen with ambitions owned a hand-crank freezer packed in ice and rock salt. The method translates cleanly to a modern machine as long as you respect the order of operations.
- The hinge: add the whites lateThe beaten whites go in only after the mixture has frozen to a slush, so they are whipped into a partly set base and hold their air. Stirred into the cool liquid at the start, they separate and rise, and you get a foam cap over an ice block.
- Raw egg whitesThe whites are never cooked. Use pasteurized whites from a carton, or reconstituted meringue powder, if you are serving anyone very young, pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised.
- Sirup proportionsOne quart water to two cups sugar, plus the fruit, puts the sugar somewhere around a quarter to a third of the mixture by weight before the pineapple's own sweetness is counted. That is in the right range for a scoopable sherbet; cutting the sugar much below a cup and a half is likely to give you something closer to a solid block.
- "Shredded" pineappleThis means pineapple torn or grated into coarse fibers, not the finely shredded coconut sense. A food processor pulsed a few times does the work of the food-chopper, and the drained juice should go into the pan with the pulp.
- Fresh versus cannedScalding the fruit in the boiling syrup destroys bromelain, the enzyme in fresh pineapple that would otherwise turn dairy bitter and interfere with any gelatin. Canned pineapple is already heat-treated, so it can be sieved into the cooled syrup without a second cooking if you prefer.
- Freezing without a crank freezerChill the strained base thoroughly, then churn in an ice cream machine until it is the texture of thick slush, about 15 to 20 minutes. Fold in the whites, churn 5 minutes more, and harden in the freezer for two hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes.
- YieldAbout two quarts, serving eight to ten. Sherbet made this way is best within a day or two; the meringue slowly collapses and the ice coarsens after that.
Sherbet in an American cookbook of this vintage means a water ice lightened with beaten egg white or, later, a little milk; sorbet was the French spelling of the same word, and both descend, by the standard account, from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, by way of Turkish and Italian. Pineapple was a natural candidate: the canning industry in Hawaii expanded sharply in the first decades of the twentieth century, and by the time this collection appeared tinned pineapple was a cheap pantry staple in places where the fresh fruit was a luxury, which may account for the recipe offering "fresh or canned" without preference. Frozen desserts were a genuine undertaking in this period, requiring a freezer pail, cracked ice, coarse salt and a good deal of cranking, and a fair amount of instruction was the price of admission.