Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cream Sherbet
Cream Sherbet
Thoroughly beat one ounce of caster-sugar into one pint of cream and the whites of six eggs previously beaten to a stiff froth. Dissolve one more ounce of caster-sugar in three quarts of water and pour this upon four lemons sliced thin; mix thoroughly with the other, strain, and put it into a freezer until ready for serving.
A late-Victorian milk sherbet from the Waldorf's kitchen, built on raw egg white and never heated at any stage. The proportions are also badly out of balance for anything a modern freezer will produce.
- Why it failsThe whites of six eggs go in raw and the mixture is only chilled and frozen, so nothing in the recipe ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacteria; it does not destroy them. For a frozen egg-white dessert, use a current recipe written around pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- Acid does not sterilize itFour sliced lemons in three quarts of water is far too dilute to matter. The acidity of a heavily watered lemon infusion is nowhere near enough to make raw whites safe, whatever the old texts imply.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster or baker's sugar. One ounce is about two level tablespoons — which is the other problem with the recipe.
- The sugar is impossibly lowThe sugar is very low -- Two ounces of sugar total against three quarts of water, a pint of cream and six whites is a small fraction of what a sherbet needs. Sugar controls freezing point as well as sweetness; at this ratio the water fraction would set into a hard, weakly flavoured block of ice rather than a scoopable sherbet. It may be a misprint, but there is no way to know what measure was intended.
- "A freezer"In 1896 this means a hand-cranked churn packed in ice and coarse salt, turned continuously. It is a machine that agitates while it chills, not a cold box — the modern equivalent is an ice cream maker, not the freezer compartment.
- "Sherbet" in this periodAn iced drink or soft water-ice, often containing milk or cream and sometimes served between courses rather than as dessert. It is not the firm American supermarket sherbet of the twentieth century.
- ScaleThree quarts of water plus a pint of cream is close to a gallon of finished ice — a banquet quantity, not a household one.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation from 1893 onward, compiled The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), a very large collection of hotel and household receipts in which quantities are sometimes hard to reconcile with the method. The word sherbet is generally traced through Turkish and Persian to an Arabic word for a drink, and in earlier use described a sweetened, iced or chilled beverage rather than a frozen confection; nineteenth-century American usage sat between the two, which may be why a preparation this watery could still be called a sherbet. Cream and beaten egg white were among the means used to give a water-ice body and pale colour before commercial stabilizers, and raw whites do appear in printed recipes of the 1890s -- which is why a number of recipes of the decade cannot be reproduced as printed.