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Lemon Banana Sherbet
Two quarts of milk, one quart of sugar, three bananas, and the juice of five large lemons. With a silver spoon mash bananas into smooth paste, and mix with the lemon juice. Stir milk and sugar until well dissolved, strain and put into freezer; freeze about ten minutes, then add lemon juice and bananas, and freeze ten minutes longer. Pack and set away to ripen, which will take from two to two and a half hours.
— Mrs. Frederic E. Craigie
A milk sherbet of the kind that filled the ice-cream chapter of every community cookbook before home freezers. The whole method is built around one problem: lemon juice curdles milk.
- Add the acid late, and coldThe instruction to freeze the milk and sugar ten minutes before the lemon goes in works in the cook's favour, whatever the reason it was written. Poured into warm or even cool sweetened milk, the juice of five lemons will flocculate it into grainy curds; stirred into a half-frozen slush it disperses with less damage. Expect a slightly granular texture regardless — that is what a milk sherbet is.
- "Freezer" means a churnAt the time this meant a hand-cranked can set in a wooden bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt. An electric ice-cream maker does the same work; the two ten-minute stages become roughly ten minutes of churning, then the addition, then churning until it holds a soft ridge.
- Packing and ripening"Pack and set away to ripen" means drain the brine, repack the can in fresh ice and salt, cover with cloth or newspaper, and leave it the two to two and a half hours the recipe allows, to firm and mellow. A freezer at 0F does this in about the same time; press plastic wrap onto the surface first.
- A quart of sugarMeasured by volume, not weight: about 4 cups, roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb. Against 2 quarts of milk this is very sweet by current taste, though sugar is also what keeps the mixture from freezing into a solid brick. Cut it back much and the result will be noticeably harder and icier.
- The lemonsFive large lemons of the period yield something like 3/4 to 1 cup of juice. Measure rather than count, and strain out the pulp and seeds.
- Why a silver spoonCut fruit browns readily, and contact with reactive metals such as the tinned or iron utensils of the period was widely believed to discolour it, which is the usual explanation offered for directions like this one. Stainless steel or a fork on a plate does the job now; work quickly and get the lemon juice onto the mashed fruit at once.
- BananasUse fruit that is fully ripe and freckled — three medium bananas, about 12 oz peeled. Underripe fruit contributes starch and a chalky note rather than sweetness.
- YieldClose to 3 quarts finished, which is more than many domestic ice-cream makers hold. Halve it unless you have a large machine or are feeding a crowd.
Milk sherbets sat between water ices and ice cream in the American dessert vocabulary: cheaper than a custard, richer than a lemon ice, and made from what a household already had. Their appearance in a subscription cookbook like this one points to two things: reliable ice, cut from local ponds in winter and stored in icehouses through the summer, and bananas, which the steamship trade brought within reach of ordinary Northeastern kitchens in the 1880s and 1890s and which cookbooks of the period often treat as a mild novelty worth pairing with a sharper flavour. The attribution to Mrs. Frederic E. Craigie is characteristic of the genre: such cookbooks were commonly compiled by subscription for a church or library fund, with contributors listed under their husbands' names.