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White-Cherry Sherbet
Remove the stems and stones from four breakfast cupfuls of large ripe white cherries, put them in a mortar, pound thoroughly so as to break the stones, and strain the juice into a freezer. Put the pulp into a saucepan with one teacupful of sugar and one breakfast cupful of water, and boil for a few minutes, in order to extract the flavor from the kernels, pass the mixture through a sieve into another saucepan and add one breakfast cupful of water and sugar. Boil for a minute or two, let the mixture cool, pour it into the freezer with the juice, add the whites of two eggs whipped to a froth, and the sherbet is then ready for use. A few whole cherries which have been cooked in syrup may be added to the mixture while it is still in the freezer.
This is a kernel-flavoured sherbet, and the flavour comes from a part of the fruit that is genuinely toxic. The two problems below are both structural to the method, so the recipe cannot be adapted here.
- The crushed stones are the hazardCherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel tissue is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar accomplishes. The recipe then boils the mash specifically to draw that kernel flavour into the syrup, so the compound ends up in the finished sherbet rather than being discarded with the pits.
- Quantity is not incidentalFour breakfast cupfuls of cherries means on the order of a hundred stones, all of them deliberately broken. Occasional accidental ingestion of a swallowed whole pit is harmless because the intact seed coat passes through; grinding removes that protection.
- Boiling does not make it safeHydrogen cyanide is volatile and some of it will be driven off, but a few minutes' boiling is no reliable decontamination, and the whole object of the step is to draw the kernel flavour into the syrup and keep it there.
- Raw egg whiteThe whipped whites of two eggs go into the freezer uncooked and are never brought to any temperature at all; the mixture is then held cold. That is a separate salmonella exposure on top of the kernel problem.
- If you want cherry sherbetUse a current recipe built on fruit pulp and juice alone, with pasteurised egg white or none. Almond extract supplies the marzipan note that Oscar was extracting from the stones.
- On the measures, for reading purposesA breakfast cup is the larger of the two, generally reckoned at roughly 8-10 fl oz against about 6 fl oz for a teacup, so the two are not interchangeable. The second addition of "water and sugar" gives no sugar quantity at all.
Crushing the stones was standard practice in nineteenth-century confectionery, where the kernel — noyau, in the French kitchen — was prized for the bitter-almond perfume it gave to ratafias, custards, macaroons and iced desserts. Cooks used peach kernels, apricot kernels and cherry stones more or less interchangeably with bitter almonds. The toxicity was documented through the nineteenth century, but the connection was not made firmly enough to drive the technique out of professional kitchens. White cherries here probably means a pale sweet variety, perhaps chosen so the sherbet would freeze to a clean ivory rather than pink. The whipped egg white is doing the job a modern kitchen would give to a stabiliser: it keeps the ice smooth in a hand-cranked freezer that could not churn fast enough to prevent large crystals.