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Lemon Sherbet
Make a syrup of one quart of water and three cups of sugar. Add three-fourths cup of lemon juice and freeze. When the mixture is frozen to a mush, add the beaten whites of two eggs.
The syrup and lemon are straightforward; the problem is the finish. The two egg whites go in after the mixture is frozen, so nothing in the recipe ever heats them.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe syrup would have been heated, but it is cooled and frozen to a mush before the beaten whites are folded in, so the whites are never cooked. Salmonella on or in shell eggs survives freezing — freezing suspends bacteria rather than killing them — and the sherbet is then served cold. Use pasteurized egg white, or an Italian meringue cooked with hot syrup, instead.
- Why the eggs are there at allThe whites are not for flavor. Beaten into a half-frozen ice they add air and interrupt ice-crystal growth, which is what keeps a water ice from setting into a solid lemon brick. Any substitute has to do that same mechanical job.
- The syrup proportionOne quart water to three cups sugar works out at roughly 38 to 39 percent sugar by weight before the lemon juice goes in — high by modern sorbet standards. Sugar depresses the freezing point, which is what keeps the mixture workable in a salt-and-ice freezer.
- Three-fourths cup of lemon juiceThat is the juice of roughly three to six lemons, depending on size.
- "Freeze" means a crank freezerAt the time this meant a wooden tub packed with crushed ice and rock salt around a metal can with a paddle. The dasher kept the mixture moving against the can wall, which is why the recipe assumes a smooth mush stage rather than a solid block.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half to two quarts of finished sherbet — a water ice of this kind was served in cups between courses or after a heavy meat course, not in scoops.
Butterick's ice chapter takes up frozen desserts of two broad kinds: ice-creams built on cream or custard, and ices built on water, sugar and fruit juice. A sherbet was generally understood to sit between the two, ices with something worked into them: egg white or, in some books, dissolved gelatine or milk, though period American cookbooks were not consistent in how they separated sherbet from sorbet or granita, and the terms were often used interchangeably. The word itself comes through Turkish şerbet from Arabic sharba, a sweetened drink, and the earliest European sherbets were indeed drinks rather than frozen dishes; the sense shifted as ice became cheap. That cheapness is the real story behind a recipe like this one. Commercial ice harvesting and, later, mechanical ice plants put a hundred pounds of ice within reach of an ordinary household by the turn of the century, and hand-crank freezers were sold by the thousands. A lemon sherbet asked for nothing but water, sugar, lemons and eggs, which made it the frozen dessert a cook could produce any month of the year.