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Milk Sherbet
One quart of rich milk sweetened to suit your taste; flavor with vanilla and freeze. When nearly frozen, squeeze the juice of one lemon into the sherbet and stir well with a large spoon, and continue to freeze until solid. -Mrs. P. F. Pescud, New Orleans, La.
A four-ingredient frozen dessert that depends entirely on timing: the lemon goes in late, after the milk has already set up, so the acid cannot curdle it into grains.
- The hingeAdd the lemon juice only when the mixture is nearly frozen and thick, exactly as written. Lemon juice stirred into liquid milk risks curdling the casein, and the sherbet can freeze grainy and flecked.
- "Rich milk"In this period this meant unhomogenised whole milk with the cream still on it, richer than today's whole milk. Use whole milk with a few tablespoons of heavy cream stirred in, or half-and-half thinned with milk.
- Sugar quantity"Sweetened to suit your taste" is unhelpfully open, and sugar is not optional here: it controls texture as much as sweetness. Around 3/4 to 1 cup per quart is a common range for a milk sherbet; with much less it freezes very hard.
- Freezing equipmentThe original assumes a hand-cranked bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which churns continuously. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; the "nearly frozen" stage is when it looks like thick soft-serve, usually 20-30 minutes in depending on the machine.
- Without a machineFreeze in a shallow metal pan and whisk hard every 30 minutes. Add the lemon at the third or fourth stirring, once the mass is slushy and holding shape.
- VanillaUse a teaspoon or so of extract, added to the cold base before churning. Vanilla extract of the period varied in strength, and some households made their own.
- Yield and servingA quart of base gives about five small servings. Milk sherbet hardens very firm because of its low fat content; let it sit out ten minutes before scooping.
Milk sherbets sit between water ices and true ice creams, and appear in nineteenth-century American cookery; milk was cheaper and easier to come by than the quantity of cream an ice cream demanded. The trick of adding lemon to partly frozen milk appears in other community cookbooks of the era. The recipe carries a named contributor's attribution and reads as though printed much as she sent it, terse measurements and all. The word sherbet itself traces back through Turkish şerbet to Arabic sharba, a drink, and originally described a sweetened chilled beverage rather than anything frozen solid.