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Pineapple Water Ice
Cut into halves a rather small pineapple, reserving one-half for future use; pare the other half neatly, cut it into small pieces and place them in a mortar, pounding them thoroughly to a pulp, say for about ten minutes. Then add half a pound of powdered sugar and again pound for five minutes, place the whole of this mixture in a vessel, squeeze in the juice of three lemons, pour in a quart of cold water, mix thoroughly with a spatula for two minutes, and strain through a fine hair-sieve into the freezer, adding the whites of a couple of eggs, beaten to a stiff froth, and beat well for a minute or so longer, and freeze.
The fruit-and-sugar part of this is a straightforward sorbet, but the finish is not: two raw egg whites are folded in and the mixture is never heated at any stage.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites go into a cold mixture and are frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only holds it dormant, and the bacteria revive as the ice softens on the plate. Nothing in this method brings the egg anywhere near a safe temperature. Use a current sorbet recipe instead.
- Why the whites were there at allIn a hand-cranked freezer, beaten white would have added air and helped keep the ice from setting into a solid block, though the recipe does not say so. Modern ice-cream makers and the sugar load itself do that work, and contemporary water ices generally omit egg.
- Freezer means the churn"The freezer" in 1896 is the pail-and-dasher machine packed with ice and rock salt, not a compartment in a refrigerator. "Freeze" means churn continuously until it sets.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve of woven horsehair. A fine-mesh strainer or a chinois is the equivalent; the point is to remove the pineapple fibre, which is coarse and unpleasant in a frozen ice.
- Pineapple and gelatineFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease. It has no effect on a water ice, but it is the reason fresh pineapple will not set in a gelatine dessert.
- YieldA quart of water plus the fruit, half a pound of sugar and the juice of three lemons comes to something over six cups of mixture before freezing.
Water ices -- fruit, sugar, water, no dairy -- were a staple branch of frozen desserts in nineteenth-century American hotel cookery, served between courses at long dinners as much as at the end of them. Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) records the working repertoire of a hotel that made its reputation on exactly this kind of thing, and the mortar-and-pestle instruction is a reminder that a large kitchen brigade had the labour to pound fruit for fifteen minutes by hand. The fruit reaching New York came by steamer from the Caribbean and Florida, and a single small pineapple is halved here with the other half explicitly "reserved for future use." The lemon juice is not incidental either -- acid sharpens the perception of fruit flavour in something served very cold, when the palate is dulled.