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Lemon Sherbet (Three lemons one pound)
Three lemons, one pound powdered sugar, one quart milk; squeeze lemons, add to sugar, and just before freezing add milk.
— Miss Fannie Warrington
A two-ingredient milk sherbet that depends entirely on the order of operations. Everything about the result hinges on keeping the lemon juice and the milk apart until the last possible moment.
- Add the milk last, and coldAcid curdles milk on contact, so the juice and sugar must be fully combined and chilled before the milk goes in. Pour the cold milk into the lemon syrup, stir once, and get it into the freezer immediately — any standing time and you have sweet curds in whey. Some graininess is normal in milk sherbets of this type.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn American cookbooks of this era powdered sugar means granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern cornstarch-cut variety. Use superfine or caster sugar; one pound is about 2 1/4 cups. Confectioners' sugar will work but adds a faint starchy body.
- Three lemonsRoughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of juice depending on size, so taste the syrup as you go. The sugar is deliberately high because sugar is what keeps a hand-frozen sherbet from setting into a solid brick.
- One quart milkWhole milk. Skim or low-fat gives a hard, icy texture with nothing to soften it, since there is no cream and no egg in the mix.
- "Just before freezing"Some kind of freezer packed with ice and rock salt, crank or still-frozen; a crank freezer takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes of steady work. In a modern machine, churn 20 to 25 minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- YieldNearer a quart and a half once the dissolved sugar and juice are counted in. Serve it soon after churning; held overnight it freezes hard and the texture coarsens.
Milk sherbets like this one sat in a middle ground between the water ice and the ice cream, cheaper than a custard-based cream and much quicker to make, which is probably why they turn up so often in nineteenth-century church and village fundraising cookbooks. The word sherbet itself descends ultimately from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and is generally said to have reached English by way of Turkish and Persian; by the 1880s American usage seems to have drifted toward meaning a frozen dessert containing some milk, as distinct from a dairy-free water ice. That a recipe this brief was worth printing at all says something about how the ice-cream freezer had spread through ordinary households after the crank-and-dasher machines of the mid-century became affordable hings a a cook had to buy were lemons and sugar, and ice was cut from local ponds in winter and kept in an icehouse through summer. The attribution to Miss Fannie Warrington is typical of the form: these community books were assembled from named neighbors, and the signature was as much social credit as citation.