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Currant Ice
Boil down three pints of water and a pound and a half sugar to one quart, skim, add two cups of currant juice. and when partly frozen, add the whites of five eggs.
The syrup and juice here are unremarkable, but the finish is not: five raw egg whites are stirred into a nearly frozen ice and never heated again. That is the reason this one stays on the page rather than in the freezer.
- The raw whites are the problemThe sugar syrup is boiled, but it is cooled and partly frozen before the whites go in, so the eggs never reach any temperature that would reduce Salmonella. Freezing does not kill the organism; it preserves it, and the mixture is eaten cold and unbaked.
- Five whites is a large doseThis is not a trace of raw egg in a batter that will be cooked. Five whites in roughly a quart and a half of ice means every serving carries uncooked egg, and ices of this kind were often served to children and, in some period books, to invalids.
- Long holding in the freezerAn ice like this was packed in salt and ice and eaten within hours. Kept days in a modern freezer and softened at the edges each time it is served, the egg-white foam spends repeated stretches in the temperature range where bacteria multiply.
- What to do insteadIf you want a currant ice with meringue body, use a current recipe built on either pasteurized whites or a cooked Italian meringue. Do not attempt to patch this version.
- Reading the original, for interest"Boil down three pints of water and a pound and a half sugar to one quart" is a reduction instruction, not a measured syrup: the cook boiled until the volume fell by a third. Two cups of currant juice means the strained juice of fresh red currants, roughly two to two and a half pounds of fruit.
- YieldAs written the mixture would have come to something over a quart and a half once the whites went in, perhaps eight to ten of the small glasses then used for ices.
Currants — the red and white Ribes bushes, not the dried Zante grapes sold under the same name — were a fixture of nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens, valued because they ripened in quantity, gave a sharp clear juice and set well with sugar. Their tartness made them a favorite base for water ices, which in the ice-cream chapters of books like The Dixie Cook Book (1883) sit alongside the richer custard creams as the lighter, dairy-free option. Beaten whites stirred in at the end were one way of turning a plain water ice into something closer to what was called a sherbet: the air made a hand-cranked freezer's coarse ice seem smoother than it was. Home cultivation of currants declined sharply in the twentieth century after several states banned the bushes as hosts of white pine blister rust, which is much of the reason the fruit is now unfamiliar in American markets while remaining commonplace in Europe.