Home › Ices and Ice-Cream › Lemon Ice
Lemon Ice
To one pint of lemon juice, add one quart of sugar, and one quart of water, in which the thin rind of three lemons has been allowed to stand until highly flavored. When partly frozen add the whites of four eggs, beaten to a stiff froth.
A water ice in the old proportion — very sweet, very sharp — finished with raw beaten egg white to lighten it. That last step is the problem, and it is worth understanding the rest of the formula anyway.
- The raw egg whitesThe four whites are folded into a half-frozen mixture and never heated at any point. Uncooked egg white carries a Salmonella risk that freezing does not reduce; chilling only halts bacterial growth, it does not kill anything. Use a current recipe if you want a frothed, sherbet-style ice.
- Why the whites are there at allBeaten white was one common nineteenth-century way to aerate an ice and keep it from setting into a solid block. Modern recipes get a similar effect from churning, an Italian meringue, or gelatin.
- The measuresA pint of lemon juice is 2 cups, which takes roughly 12 to 16 lemons depending on size. A quart of sugar is a volume measure of 4 cups, not a weight; a quart of water is 4 cups.
- That much sugar is not a mistakeSugar depresses the freezing point, so a heavily sweetened ice stays scoopable rather than freezing to a rock. Cutting it substantially, as some readers are tempted to do, gives you a lemon-flavoured brick.
- The rind infusionOnly the thin yellow zest of three lemons is wanted; the white pith turns the water bitter. The book gives no time or temperature, only "highly flavored"; a cold steeping would need hours, and warming the water draws the oils out faster.
- "Partly frozen"In a hand-cranked freezer this is the slushy stage, when the mixture holds a ridge from the dasher but is still soft throughout; how long that takes depends entirely on the freezer and the ice-and-salt packing.
- YieldTwo cups of juice, four of water and four of sugar; once the sugar dissolves that is something over two quarts finished -- a party quantity by any modern reckoning.
Water ices reached American cookbooks by way of Italy and France, where sorbetto and sorbet had been fashionable since the later seventeenth century, and by the 1870s they were within reach of households that could buy ice. The commercial ice trade, cut from northern lakes in winter and stored in sawdust, helped make frozen desserts a summer possibility for ordinary families rather than a luxury for the very rich. Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of that moment, and its ices are made in a hand-cranked freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt. Period books often distinguished a plain water ice from a "sherbet" lightened with beaten egg white or dissolved gelatin, though the usage was not consistent; the word sherbet itself traces back through Turkish and Arabic to a sweetened cold drink rather than anything frozen.