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Lemon Water Ice
Rub off the peels of six lemons onto one-half pound of loaf sugar, place it in a basin, and strain the juice of the lemons over; with this prepare a syrup, using four or five breakfast cupfuls of water and another pound of sugar. Strain, and then add the whites of four eggs, well-beaten together, with one ounce of powdered sugar. Place it in the freezer, and work as required.
The syrup and zest work are sound, but the finished ice depends on four raw egg whites that are never heated at any point. That single step puts the recipe outside what can be recommended today.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites go into the freezer uncooked and stay that way. Salmonella on or in a shell egg is not killed by freezing or by sugar syrup at room temperature; a churned ice simply distributes any contamination evenly through the batch. Use a current sorbet recipe instead.
- Why the whites are there at allBeaten whites appear in a good many nineteenth-century water ices, where they help keep the mixture from setting into a solid block of crystals in a hand-cranked pail. The function here is textural rather than flavouring.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken up as needed. The lump is used here as an abrasive: rubbing it over the lemon peel strips the oil-bearing zest without the bitter white pith beneath.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in this period runs to roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so "four or five" is somewhere between a quart and about a quart and a half. The recipe gives no closer measure.
- "Work as required"This assumes a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, turned and scraped by hand until the mixture takes. It is an instruction to a kitchen with a standing supply of block ice, not a timing.
Water ices — fruit juice, sugar and water, with no dairy — were a fixture of grand hotel service, sent to the table between heavy courses as a palate cleanser or, sweetened further, as a dessert in its own right. The trick of rubbing a sugar lump over citrus peel to capture the oil is older than the recipe by well over a century and appears throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confectionery writing; it gives a far more aromatic result than grated zest, which carries pith and pulp with it.