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Lemon Milk Sherbet
Into the juice of three lemons put two and a half cups of sugar. When ready to freeze stir gradually into the lemon and sugar, three pints of fresh milk. Freeze at once. Skimmed milk may be used.
A three-ingredient sherbet that depends entirely on order of operations: the lemon juice must go into the milk cold and at the last moment, or the acid will curdle it.
- The hinge: acid into cold milk, then freeze immediatelyLemon juice will clabber milk on contact, and the warmer the milk the coarser the curds. Chill both mixtures thoroughly, stir the milk into the syrup slowly, and start churning at once. Some fine graininess is normal in this style of sherbet and disappears in the mouth.
- Quantities in modern termsThree lemons yield roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of juice; three pints of milk is 6 cups. The base comes to something over 2 quarts before churning, enough for 8 to 10 servings, so it needs a machine of at least 2-quart capacity and preferably larger. Halve the recipe for a smaller canister.
- "Freeze at once" means a churnThe original assumes an ice-and-salt freezer worked by hand. Any modern churn works. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and break up the mass with a fork every 30 minutes until set, which gives a granita texture rather than a smooth sherbet.
- Sugar is structuralTwo and a half cups looks extreme, but sugar is what keeps a milk-and-juice base from freezing hard. Cut it much below two cups and the result will tend to be icier and harder to scoop.
- Dissolve the syrup firstThe recipe has the sugar sitting in the lemon juice, which is not enough liquid to dissolve it. Stir until the juice is cloudy and most of the grain is gone, or warm it briefly and re-chill; undissolved sugar will settle out during churning.
- Skimmed milkThe note is authentic and works, though the result is noticeably leaner and icier. Whole milk gives the better texture; a cup of the milk replaced with cream is closer to what a modern palate expects from a milk sherbet.
- StorageBest eaten the day it is made. In a home freezer it hardens considerably, so let it stand 10 minutes before serving.
Sherbet in American cookbooks of this period sat between a water ice and an ice cream: sweeter and sharper than the latter, richer than the former, and often made with milk rather than cream. The word is generally traced into English from the Turkish and Persian şerbet/sharbat, from an Arabic root, a sweetened fruit drink, and is often said to have settled into meaning something frozen only in the nineteenth century. Lemon was a common flavour, and lemons kept and travelled when soft fruit did not, so the flavouring was available year round in a way strawberries were not. Recipes like this one reflect the era's habit of ending a hot-weather meal with something frozen and acidic rather than a baked pudding, and the instruction to "freeze at once" is a reminder that the household churn was worked by hand while the ice was still packed and salted.