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Lemon Ice-Cream
Squeeze a dozen lemons, make the juice quite thick with white sugar, stir into it very slowly, three quarts of cream, and freeze. Orange ice-cream is prepared in the same way, using less sugar.
Three ingredients and no custard, which leaves the technique doing all the work. The hinge is the order and speed of mixing: acid poured into cream curdles it, so the cream must go into the sweetened juice, and slowly.
- Add the cream to the juice, never the reverseLemon juice will clabber cream if it meets it in quantity, which is presumably why the direction is to stir the cream in "very slowly." Pouring the cream into the sweetened juice in a thin stream, stirring constantly, helps keep the mixture smooth. Some slight thickening is normal.
- How much juiceThe recipe gives no volume. A dozen modern lemons will yield roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice. Zest is not called for, but a little rubbed into the sugar sharpens the flavour.
- "Quite thick with white sugar" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no measure. A heavy lemon syrup runs at least equal volumes of juice and sugar, and for three quarts of cream you will likely want more than that. Taste the base before freezing, since cold mutes sweetness noticeably.
- Scale it downThree quarts of cream plus syrup makes roughly a gallon of finished ice-cream once churned, well past the capacity of a domestic machine. Quartering the recipe gives about a quart.
- Freezing"Freeze" here means a hand-cranked bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. A modern churn works directly; without one, still-freeze in a shallow pan and beat thoroughly every 30 minutes until set, or the texture will be coarse.
- No eggs, and that is deliberateThis is a Philadelphia-style ice-cream, uncooked and uncustarded. Use cream with real fat in it, 36 percent or better, since fat is the only thing standing between this and an ice.
- The orange variationOranges are far sweeter and less acidic than lemons, so both less sugar and less curdling risk. A dozen oranges yields far more liquid than a dozen lemons; use about the same volume of juice and add zest, or the flavour will read as faintly of nothing.
- ServingBest within a day or two. Without eggs or stabilisers it hardens and grows icy in a home freezer, so let it temper 10 to 15 minutes before scooping.
Buckeye Cookery ran through many editions from the late 1870s onward, and its ices chapter assumes a household with an ice-house or a standing account with an ice dealer, which by the 1880s meant a great many American towns. The uncooked cream-and-fruit formula is what later writers came to call Philadelphia-style, in contrast to the egg-thickened French custard base; it is quicker, tastes more purely of its fruit, and was well suited to a hand-cranked freezer of the sort patented in the mid nineteenth century and sold cheaply by the time this book appeared. The terseness of the entry is telling: the compilers assumed the reader knew how to pack a freezer with ice and salt and needed only to be told the proportions of the mixture. That lemon and orange share a single paragraph, with the whole variation handled in one clause, is a good measure of how routine frozen desserts had become in a middling American kitchen.