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Lemon Sherbet (Six lemons four large oranges)
Six lemons, four large oranges, one pint of cream, two quarts of milk. Mix sugar and lemons together, add cream and milk, and freeze.
— Miss Sophia Ullet
A village receipt written for a cook who already knew how to fill an ice cream freezer, which means most of the working detail is missing. The quantities of fruit and dairy are given; the sugar, the juicing, and the freezing are all assumed.
- The sugar is not specified"Mix sugar and lemons together" gives no amount, and there is no safe way to infer one from the text. A milk sherbet of this volume — five pints of dairy (a pint of cream plus two quarts of milk) plus the juice of ten pieces of fruit — will likely need somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups of sugar; taste the base before freezing, since it should be noticeably too sweet at room temperature to taste right when frozen.
- Juice, not whole fruitSix lemons yield roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of juice; four large oranges roughly 1 1/2 cups, though the written method mentions only the lemons and leaves the oranges' handling unstated. Rubbing the sugar against the lemon zest first, then adding the juice, extracts the oils and may be what "mix sugar and lemons together" meant.
- The acid will curdle the milk — this is the hingeThat much citrus juice in two quarts of milk clabbers it on contact. Dissolve the sugar completely in the juice, chill both mixtures hard, and add the acid to the dairy slowly with constant stirring. The base may still look slightly grainy; churning smooths it out. Whole milk and full-fat cream hold together better than low-fat.
- "Freeze" meant a crank freezerA wooden bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked for 20 to 30 minutes. A modern ice cream machine does the same work; without one, still-freeze in a shallow pan and beat thoroughly every 30 minutes until set, or the ice crystals will be coarse.
- What "sherbet" meant hereA nineteenth-century American milk sherbet is not a sorbet — it contains dairy but far less cream than ice cream, so it freezes harder and icier. Expect a firm, granular texture rather than a scoopable one; let it temper 10 minutes before serving.
- YieldRoughly 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 quarts before churning and somewhat more after, which serves 12 to 16. This is a party quantity.
- RipeningFreshly churned it will be soft. Pack it into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer for at least two hours before serving.
Milk sherbets like this one sat between the fruit ice and the ice cream on American tables from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Community cookbooks of the 1890s — of which the Catskill volume is a characteristic example, with each receipt signed by the townswoman who contributed it — were typically compiled to raise money for a church, library or relief society, and they record what people actually made rather than what a professional thought they should. Citrus in quantity in an upstate New York village speaks to oranges and lemons arriving by rail and rating as a small luxury, and to a household with reliable access to ice — cut from the Hudson and its tributaries in winter and stored in sawdust, an industry the Catskill region knew well.