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Currant Ice
One pint of currant juice, one pound of sugar, and one pint of water; put in freezer, and when partly frozen add the whites of three eggs well beaten.
A plain water ice of the old bucket-freezer type, with beaten egg white stirred in near the end to lighten it. The egg is the problem: it is added to an already-cold mixture and never cooked at any stage.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites go into a partly frozen mixture and stay raw through serving and storage. Salmonella in shell eggs is not killed by freezing, and a sugar-and-fruit-acid base does not pasteurise anything. Anyone wanting a currant sorbet with a meringue-style lightener should follow a current recipe that addresses the egg.
- "Put in freezer"The freezer here is a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt, not a compartment in an appliance. "Partly frozen" means the stage where the mixture has thickened to a slush against the sides of the can and is still stirrable.
- Currant juiceAlmost certainly red currants, crushed and strained; the recipe does not specify, though it is not the dried Zante currant, which is a grape. A pint of juice takes roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of fresh fruit.
- The syrup ratioA pound of sugar to a pint of juice and a pint of water is roughly 30 percent sugar by weight, which is why the mixture stays scoopable rather than setting to a solid block. Red currants are sharply acidic, so the sweetness reads as balanced rather than cloying.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a quarter before the egg, serving six to eight in the small portions of the period.
Water ices flavoured with fruit juice were the everyday end of nineteenth-century ice-making: no custard, no cream, just juice, sugar syrup and hard cranking in a salted ice pail. Red currants were a standard kitchen-garden fruit across the northern United States and Canada in the 1870s, prolific, briefly in season in midsummer, and too tart for much beyond jelly, shrub and ices, which is why they turn up so often in books of this vintage and so rarely now. The beaten whites folded in at the slush stage add air and body to a mixture that would otherwise freeze coarse and grainy; mixtures lightened this way are commonly called sherbets in period books. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributed household recipes, which accounts for the telegraphic style here, with no yield, no timing, and an assumption that every reader knew her own freezer.