Home › Ice Creams, Etc › Lemon Ice Cream (To one gallon of rich cream)
Lemon Ice Cream (To one gallon of rich cream)
To one gallon of rich cream add six lemons; sqeeze the juice from the lemons; first grate the yellow rind off, and put in a piece of thin cloth. After straining the lemon juice soak the bag of peel in it, squeezing the bag often till it becomes colored by it. Add two teacups of sugar.
A plain uncooked ice cream — cream, lemon, sugar, nothing else — written for a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and salt. Two things need attention before you start: the sugar is far too low by modern taste, and acid poured into cream will curdle it if handled carelessly.
- Add the juice last, and coldLemon juice will curdle cream on contact if either is warm or if the juice goes in fast. Chill the cream to refrigerator temperature, dissolve the sugar in it first, then trickle the strained juice in while stirring constantly, and freeze immediately. Slight graininess is normal in this style; a broken, cheesy curd is not.
- Teacups and sugarA period teacup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, so two teacups is roughly 1 1/2 cups. For a full gallon of cream that works out at only about 7 to 8 percent sugar by weight, well under the 15 percent or so usual in modern ice cream, so it will taste flat and freeze hard. Sweeten to taste before freezing and expect to need more than is written.
- Scale it downA gallon of cream fills a 6-quart crank freezer and yields something like 24 to 30 servings. For a 1 1/2-quart domestic machine use 3 cups heavy cream, 1 cup whole milk, about 1 cup sugar and the zest and juice of 2 lemons.
- The cloth bag of zestThis is a cold infusion, not a syrup: the grated rind goes in thin muslin and is steeped and pressed in the juice so the oils colour and flavour it without leaving gritty flecks. A modern shortcut is to rub the zest into the sugar, let it stand half an hour, then strain.
- "Rich cream"This meant unhomogenised cream skimmed off standing milk, often 30 to 40 percent fat. Heavy cream is the closest match, but all heavy cream makes a heavy, buttery ice cream when churned; cutting it with a quarter to a third whole milk gives a texture closer to what the book intends.
- Freezing in a crank freezerIf you are using the original equipment, pack the tub with crushed ice and rock salt at roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, and crank steadily rather than in bursts. Once frozen, draw off the brine, repack, and let it stand an hour to ripen and firm.
- No eggs, so serve it soonWith no custard base or stabiliser this mixture has nothing to hold water in suspension and will grow coarse and icy within a day or two in the freezer. It is at its best straight from the churn or after a short ripening.
Lemon was among the earliest ice cream flavours to become common in English and American households, for the practical reason that citrus kept and travelled while soft fruit did not. Recipes like this one, with no eggs and no cooking, belong to the older "cream ice" tradition, which ran in parallel with the egg-custard bases now standard; the book's phrasing — a gallon of cream, six lemons, two teacups of sugar — assumes a family with its own dairy supply and a crank freezer on the back porch, of the kind of hand freezer in use from the mid-nineteenth century. The instruction to steep grated zest in a cloth bag is a survival of much earlier confectionery practice, where oil-bearing peel was infused rather than left in the mixture, and it is the one step in the recipe that a modern cook would still recognise as a refinement rather than a shortcut.