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Lemon Sherbet (Two quarts of milk one quart)
Two quarts of milk, one quart of sugar, juice of five lemons. Freeze sugar and milk until like mush, then add the juice of lemons and finish freezing.
— Mrs. Amelia E. Whittaker
A milk sherbet of the plainest kind: three ingredients, and a single point of technique that decides whether it works.
- Why the lemon goes in lateAcid added to cold sweetened milk curdles it into visible flecks. Freezing the milk and sugar to a thick mush first means the curds that do form are too small and too locked in ice to read on the tongue. Adding the juice at the start gives a grainy, separated result.
- A quart of sugarMeasured by volume, as was normal in this period: about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 12 oz. That is a high proportion, but sugar is what keeps a milk-based sherbet from freezing into a solid block, so do not cut it by much.
- Juice of five lemonsLemon sizes vary widely; expect roughly 3/4 cup of juice from five. Measure rather than count.
- "Freeze" means a churnThe original assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and coarse salt, which agitates continuously. Any ice cream maker does the same job. Still-freezing this in a tray gives ice, not sherbet, unless you break it up and beat it several times.
- Yield and capacityRoughly two and a half to three quarts of mixture before freezing, and more once air is worked in. Many home machines hold 1.5 to 2 quarts of finished sherbet, so plan on two batches. Serves about twelve.
- Milk, not creamWhole milk is what is meant. It freezes harder and icier than a custard base, so serve it soon after churning; overnight in a modern freezer it sets very firm and needs fifteen minutes on the counter.
- Bought lemon juiceBottled juice carries a cooked, dull note that this recipe has nothing to hide behind. Fresh juice and a little of the zest rubbed into the sugar make a noticeable difference.
Milk sherbets like this one occupy a middle ground that has largely disappeared: cheaper than an egg custard ice cream, richer than a water ice, and often said to have been a fixture of church suppers and summer gatherings where a hand freezer was cranked on the porch. The word sherbet reaches English through Turkish and Persian from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened cold drink; in English its frozen sense develops through the nineteenth century. That such a recipe appears among the "Village Receipts" of a Catskill collection is unsurprising: the region's boarding houses and summer hotels fed city visitors through the hot months, and a dessert built from milk, sugar and a few lemons required no ice house full of cream and no oven at all, only ice and rock salt.