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Banana Sherbet
Three pints of milk, pint and a half of sugar, juice of three lemons, six bananas (crushed); dissolve the sugar in the milk, and freeze.
When partly frozen add the lemon juice and bananas and finish freezing.
— Mrs. Elmer P. Miller
A milk sherbet rather than a water ice, and the order of operations is the whole recipe: acid goes into cold, half-frozen milk, never into warm.
- Add the lemon juice late, and coldThree lemons' worth of juice stirred into sweetened milk at room temperature is likely to curdle it into grainy curds and whey. Freezing the milk-and-sugar base first drops the temperature far enough that any separation tends to show as fine, largely imperceptible flecks instead. If the base is still warm when the juice goes in, expect a grainy result.
- Quantities in cupsThree pints of milk is 6 cups; a pint and a half of sugar is 3 cups, measured by volume as was standard then, roughly 21 oz. Three lemons give about 1/3 to 1/2 cup of juice.
- That much sugar is deliberateIt reads as extreme, but sugar is what keeps a milk sherbet from freezing into a solid brick. Cutting it substantially will give you a hard, icy block rather than something scoopable. Reduce by a quarter at most.
- "Freeze" means a crank freezerThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, which lets you stop midway, open the can, and stir in the fruit. A modern churn works the same way: run the base until it is the texture of thick slush, add lemon and banana, then finish churning.
- Volume and batch sizeThis makes roughly three quarts, more than most domestic ice cream machines hold. Halve it, or churn in two batches.
- The bananasUse fruit that is fully ripe and speckled; underripe banana tastes chalky and starchy once frozen. Mash rather than purée in a blender, which whips in air and turns the fruit grey. The lemon juice going in at the same moment limits browning.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what is meant. The result is lean and icy by modern standards, closer to a sorbet than to ice cream; that is the intended character of a sherbet. Ripening it in the freezer for an hour or two before serving improves the texture.
Milk sherbets like this one sat between the water ices and the custard ice creams in nineteenth-century American cookery, cheaper than a cooked custard and easier than one because they required no eggs and no stove. The banana is some guide to the recipe's date: bananas moved from novelty to grocery staple in the United States over the last decades of the nineteenth century, as steamship routes from Central America and the Caribbean shortened enough to land the fruit still edible, and by the time community cookbooks of this kind were being compiled they were common enough for a contributor to call for six without comment. The attribution to Mrs. Elmer P. Miller is typical of the genre — these books were assembled from subscribers' own household receipts, printed under the name of the woman who supplied them, and their brevity assumes a reader who already knows what a freezer is and how long to turn the crank.