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Milk Sherbet
3 lemons, 2 oranges, rind of 1 orange, 1 pint of sugar, 1 quart of milk, or better, milk or cream. Put half the sugar with the milk and place into the freezer. Turn until it begins to get thick, then add the juice and the rest of the sugar.
A frozen dairy sherbet from the era of the hand-crank freezer, built so that the citrus juice never sits in the milk long enough to curdle it. The order of operations is the whole recipe.
- Add the acid last, and lateLemon and orange juice will curdle sweetened milk on contact. The recipe holds the juice back until the base is already thick and half-frozen, which should keep any curd too fine to notice. Do not stir the juice into cold liquid milk and expect a smooth result.
- "A pint of sugar"Sugar was measured by volume in this period: 2 cups, about 14 oz. The second half of it goes in with the juice, where it dissolves slowly in a nearly frozen base — expect to churn a few minutes longer after it goes in.
- "Place into the freezer"The freezer here is a bucket churn: an inner canister surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, in proportions that vary from source to source, commonly somewhere between 3 and 8 parts ice to 1 of salt by volume. A modern ice-cream maker with a frozen bowl does the same job; "turn until it begins to get thick" means the soft-serve stage, usually 20 to 30 minutes in a frozen-bowl machine.
- The orange rindOnly one rind is called for, and the recipe does not say how it is used; the point is presumably the oils. Paring it in wide strips free of white pith, steeping it in the sugared milk, and lifting it out before churning is one way to handle it.
- Milk versus creamStraight whole milk freezes hard and coarse because there is little fat to interrupt the ice crystals. Replacing a quarter to a third of the quart with heavy cream gives a scoopable texture without turning it into ice cream.
- Juice quantitiesThree lemons yield roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of juice and two oranges about 1/2 to 2/3 cup, so the base takes about a cup of acid liquid. If your fruit is large, taste as you add rather than committing all of it.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving six to eight. It is best within an hour of churning; after a night in a modern freezer it sets very firm and needs 15 minutes at room temperature.