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Apricot Sherbet
Boil one quart of water, one-half pound of sugar seven minutes. Add one quart of apricots mashed through a colander, and juice of one lemon, and the white of one egg, one tablespoonful of fine sugar; mix thoroughly. Begin to freeze at once. Turn rapidly from the start. Pack.
A hand-cranked water ice from the era of the salt-and-ice freezer. The syrup is boiled, but the egg white that gives the sherbet its body is stirred in raw and never heated, which is where this recipe fails.
- The raw egg whiteThe white goes into the fruit purée and then straight into the freezer, so it is never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Freezing does not pasteurise; it preserves whatever is present. For a frozen apricot sherbet today, use a current recipe.
- Why the white is there at allIt is not flavour. Egg albumen adds foam and helps keep the ice from setting into a solid block. Modern versions get a similar effect from a cooked meringue, pasteurised whites, or simply more sugar and a machine that churns faster.
- "One-half pound of sugar"Sugar was sold and measured by weight in this period: half a pound of granulated is roughly a cup and two tablespoons. The seven-minute boil is making a light syrup, not a candy stage.
- "One quart of apricots mashed through a colander"Genuinely ambiguous — it may mean a quart of whole fruit before sieving or a quart of pulp after. Either way the colander is doing the work of a food mill, removing skins and fibre; the fruit is uncooked, so ripeness decides the flavour entirely.
- "Begin to freeze at once. Turn rapidly from the start."This is instruction for a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt. Fast, continuous cranking from the first minute keeps the crystals small; letting the mixture sit in the can before turning gives a grainy ice.
- "Pack"Not a serving direction. It refers to packing the can in fresh ice and salt to ripen and harden before serving.
The word sherbet reaches English through Turkish şerbet and Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and for a long while in English it meant exactly that — something poured, not spooned. By the late nineteenth century American cookbooks were often using a narrower sense, though usage remained inconsistent: a fruit water ice lightened with beaten egg white or a little milk, distinguished from the plain sugar-and-juice water ice on one side and from custard-based ice cream on the other. Frozen desserts were still labour, requiring ice, coarse salt and someone willing to crank, and a sherbet made from fresh apricots marked a household with both a fruit supply and hands to spare. Apricots themselves were becoming widely available in this period as California orchards and commercial canneries expanded, so a fruit that barely travels could appear with some confidence in a printed recipe.