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Lemon Ice Cream
Rasp the yellow rind of two large fresh lemons upon half a pound of loaf sugar. Powder it, and strain over it the juice of one lemon. Add a quart of cream, stir until the sugar is dissolved, freeze, and serve. If milk has to be substituted for the cream, it may be enriched by the addition of the yolks of four eggs. It must then be stirred over the fire until it is boiling hot, and the juice must not be added until the liquor has cooled. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 4s. if made with cream, 1s. if made with milk. Sufficient for rather less than three pints of cream.
A simple lemon cream that predates the electric churn; the only real difficulties are the imperial measures and the acid meeting the dairy.
- Rasping the sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard cone, and rubbing it against the lemon peel scraped off the zest while the sugar absorbed the oil. With granulated sugar, zest the lemons finely and rub the zest into the sugar with your fingertips, then let it sit 20 minutes before proceeding.
- Loaf sugar quantityHalf a pound is 8 oz, about 1 1/8 cups of granulated sugar. That is not a lot of sugar for nearly five cups of dairy, so the finished ice may set fairly hard; temper it a few minutes before scooping.
- A quart of creamAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, roughly 4 3/4 US cups. The book does not specify a grade; the 'cream' of such recipes was probably nearer modern light or single cream than heavy whipping cream.
- Acid and dairyThis is the hinge. Lemon juice will curdle cream on contact if either is warm, so keep the cream refrigerator-cold, strain the juice in slowly while stirring, and churn at once rather than letting the mixture stand.
- The custard version"Boiling hot" is the one instruction to disregard. Four yolks in milk will scramble above about 185F; cook to 175-180F, until it coats a spoon, then chill thoroughly before the juice goes in, exactly as the recipe warns.
- FreezingThe original means a pail freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, worked by hand. Use an ice cream machine, or still-freeze in a shallow pan and beat the mixture smooth every 40 minutes until set.
- Yield'Rather less than three pints' imperial, so somewhere around 1.5 litres, which serves 8 to 10. The costs quoted in shillings are Victorian retail prices and have no modern equivalent.
Cassell's was a household dictionary of the 1870s and 80s, arranged alphabetically and priced for the middle-class kitchen, which explains the note on cost in both cream and milk versions. Lemon was among the earliest and most persistent ice cream flavours in English cookery, appearing in confectioners' manuals well before the century began, partly because citrus and sugar keep. The rasping technique is older than the recipe: with sugar sold in solid cones and no such thing as a microplane, dragging the loaf across the fruit was one way to capture the peel oil, and the sugar-and-oil paste it produced is what modern bartenders call oleo-saccharum. The instruction to hold back the juice until the custard has cooled shows the author knew perfectly well what acid does to hot milk, even without the vocabulary of protein coagulation.