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Sherbet Cream
Beat the yolks of three fresh eggs, and mix them with two pints of cream. Add a tea-spoonful of orange-flower water, or rose-water, and stir the cream without ceasing over a gentle fire until it begins to thicken. Pour it out at once, sweeten, and stir it till cold. Freeze in the usual way. Time, about a quarter of an hour to boil the cream. Sufficient for two pints and a quarter.
A thin egg custard perfumed with flower water and churned into ice cream. The instructions and the timing note contradict each other, and the sugar is left entirely to the cook.
- Never let it boilThe time note says "a quarter of an hour to boil the cream," but the method says only to stir until it thickens. Follow the method: hold the custard between 170 and 180F until it coats a spoon, and pull it off the heat immediately. Actual boiling with three yolks in two pints of cream will curdle it into sweet scrambled egg.
- Imperial pintsIf this is from a British book, two pints means 40 imperial fl oz, not 32. That is about 4 3/4 US cups of cream for the proportions the author intended. The stated "sufficient for two pints and a quarter" is best read simply as the quantity the recipe produces.
- Sweeten how muchNo quantity is given. For a churned cream of this size, 5 to 6 oz (about 3/4 cup) of caster sugar is the working range. Less than that and the mixture freezes hard and tastes flat, since sugar is what keeps ice cream scoopable.
- Orange-flower and rose waterBoth are still sold, but strengths vary a great deal between bottlings, and some modern products are far more concentrated than a household distilled water would have been. Start with half a teaspoon, taste the cold custard, and add more; too much reads as soap.
- Stir it till coldThis is not fussiness. Stirring as it cools prevents a skin forming and stops the yolk from setting in strands at the bottom of the pan. Chill the strained custard thoroughly, ideally overnight, before it goes into the machine.
- "Freeze in the usual way"For a Victorian household that meant a pail freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked and scraped down. An ice cream machine does the same job; churn 20 to 30 minutes, then firm up in the freezer for a few hours.
- YieldAbout 2 1/4 pints, as the recipe states, enough for eight or so modest servings.
The name comes to English from Arabic sharbat, a sweetened, often iced fruit drink, by way of Turkish and Persian; by the nineteenth century "sherbet" in a British cookery book could mean anything from a fizzing drink powder to a frozen sweet, and a "sherbet cream" is simply the iced dairy version. The flower waters are the older element here: distilled orange-flower and rose waters were the standard perfumes of English sweet cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and they were gradually displaced by vanilla and by imported fruit essences over the course of Victoria's reign. The recipe is really a lesson in a stirred custard base. Freezing it at home meant ice, and household ice only became reliable in British towns after the mid-century trade in Norwegian and North American lake ice made block ice cheap enough for an ordinary kitchen to buy by the pail.