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Lemon Ice Cream (Take one quart of sweet rich)
Take one quart of sweet rich cream, eight ounces of pulverized sugar, three whole eggs, one teaspoonful extract of lemon; put on the fire and stir constantly until it begins to boil; then remove and strain into the freezer.
A plain boiled custard base, thin by modern standards and flavoured only with extract. The whole thing hinges on pulling it off the heat before it actually boils.
- "Until it begins to boil"Take it to 170-180F on a thermometer and no further. Three whole eggs in a quart of cream can curdle at a true boil; the straining step called for would catch any threads of set egg.
- Pulverized sugarIn period usage this is sugar ground finer than granulated, closest to modern superfine (caster) rather than to today's confectioners' sugar. Eight ounces by weight is a generous cup; weigh it rather than measuring by volume.
- Lemon extract, not lemonThe recipe calls for extract rather than juice or zest. Lemon juice added to hot dairy will curdle it, while an alcohol-based extract of lemon oil carries the flavour without acid. If you want real lemon, infuse the zest in the cream and strain it out.
- "The freezer"Here this means a hand-crank churn set in a bucket of cracked ice and rock salt, not the freezer compartment. Any modern ice cream maker does the same job.
- Chill before churningThis recipe sends the hot custard straight into the freezer, where the ice and salt would do the cooling. Refrigerate the base to at least 40F first, ideally overnight, for a smoother set and a shorter churn.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half after churning, or six to eight servings.
Cooked-custard ice creams like this one belong to the era when the hand-crank freezer, patented in the nineteenth century and cheap by the 1890s, put frozen desserts within reach of many households. Commercial flavouring extracts were a grocery staple by then, which is why a recipe titled for lemon contains no lemon at all. The instruction to strain into the freezer is practical rather than fussy: the custard was made in a plain saucepan over a coal or wood range with no reliable heat control.