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Pineapple Sherbet
Two cans of pineapple or the same amount of fresh fruit, two pounds of sugar, two quarts of water, whites of six eggs, strain juice from the cans into the freezer, make a boiling syrup of the sugar and one quart water, chop the pineapple small, scald it in the boiling syrup, then rub it through a colander, with the syrup and remaining quart of water, into the freezer; when mixture is frozen to a mush add the beaten whites of the eggs and continue freezing.
The construction is a standard turn-of-the-century water ice, but the finishing step folds six raw egg whites into a frozen mixture that is never heated afterward. That is why this version should not be made from the page as printed.
- The raw whites are the problemThe beaten whites go into the churn once the sherbet is already frozen to a mush, so nothing in the recipe ever brings them above freezing. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella Enteritidis risk that is not reduced by sugar, acid or cold, and freezing preserves the bacteria rather than killing them. Use a current pineapple sherbet or sorbet recipe instead.
- Why the whites are there at allThey are working as an aerator and stabiliser, not a flavour: whipped albumen keeps the ice from setting into a solid block in a hand-cranked freezer. Modern recipes get the same effect from a cooked Italian meringue, pasteurised whites, or simply more churning.
- "Two cans of pineapple"Can sizes were not standardised at this period, though the common fruit tins held on the order of two to two and a half cups of fruit and juice, which would put the intended quantity somewhere near four cups. The recipe is genuinely ambiguous here, and it gives no drained-versus-packed distinction.
- The scalding step is deliberateThe scalding step -- Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down gelatine and gives raw pineapple its tongue-prickling bite; scalding the chopped fruit in boiling syrup denatures it. The recipe applies the same step to canned fruit, which has already been heat-treated, so here the scalding may be doing no more than helping the fruit break down for the colander.
- "The freezer"This means a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer: an inner canister turned inside a bucket of ice and coarse salt, with a dasher scraping the walls. It is not a mechanical appliance and not the freezer compartment of a refrigerator, which did not exist in most homes when this was printed.
- ScaleTwo quarts of water, two pounds of sugar and the fruit come to something over three quarts of finished sherbet — a party quantity, suited to the larger four- and six-quart freezers sold at the time rather than to a modern one-and-a-half-quart machine.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book for the same audience of practical middle-class housekeepers, and the ice-cream chapter reflects how far frozen desserts had moved down the social scale by the turn of the century: cheap ice from commercial ice houses and cheap hand-cranked freezers turned what had been a confectioner's luxury into something a family could churn on a back porch. Pineapple was part of the same story. West Indian and, later, Hawaiian fruit reached mainland American kitchens largely in tins as commercial canning expanded around the turn of the century, and cook books of this period often offer canned and fresh as interchangeable, as this one does. The distinction between a sherbet and a water ice was loose and much argued over in period cook books; broadly, sherbets carried something extra for body, whether beaten egg white as here, dissolved gelatine, or a little milk.